Russell laid the itinerary on the counter and we both looked at it for a moment. Six hours in STA Travel on Barnsley high street had produced a piece of A4 paper that appeared, on first reading, to contain a misprint. The countries ran down the page in two columns: Japan, China, Nepal, Tibet, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil. Twenty countries. Approximately fifty thousand miles. Roughly two years. Russell had the patience of a man who understood that some customers need to be talked down from their own ambitions and others need to be talked up into them. He had spent the afternoon doing the latter, and the Starbucks I had fetched him at lunchtime was probably inadequate compensation.
The route follows a logic that reveals itself once you spend enough time with a globe. It begins in Japan in early March, when the cherry blossom is still a few weeks away and the tourists who come specifically to photograph it have not yet arrived, and then moves south and west through Asia in the general direction of warmth, spending time in the countries that carry serious historical weight alongside the ones that are simply beautiful, and trying not to mistake the two categories for each other. From Japan down through the Philippines and into China, then overland through Tibet to Nepal, south into India and back across into Southeast Asia, down through Malaysia and Indonesia to Bali, and then east to Australia and New Zealand before the long crossing to South America and the continent I know least about and am most curious about, which is probably the right reason to go somewhere.
Japan sits at one end of the arc for reasons that are partly practical and partly about the kind of country it is. It is, in ways that are difficult to summarise without oversimplifying, the most coherently itself country in the world, a place that has spent a thousand years developing a relationship with its own culture that is simultaneously open to external influence and profoundly resistant to being reshaped by it. The Japanese borrowed writing systems from China, Buddhism from India via Korea, constitutional democracy from the Americans who drafted their post-war constitution for them in 1947, and integrated all of it into something that is recognisably Japanese in the way that almost nothing else is recognisably Japanese. Starting there, with a country that presents itself so clearly and demands that you pay attention on its own terms, seems like the right calibration for everything that follows.
Six hours in STA Travel on Barnsley high street had produced a piece of A4 paper that appeared, on first reading, to contain a misprint.
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