Falling off the crazy tree...hitting every branch on the way down

Well it has finally come to it, after thousands of words and dozens of picture less pages, Golden Week, and the best week on anti-biotics ever is finally drawing to a close. It ends with the craziest story of all, the volcanic mountain top rave, a 48 hour bender in the midst of a sprawling campground. Naturally all of the details won’t be discerned but the bulk of the insanity is describable without revealing the total disregard of societal norms, and moderation. And without further ado…

Yama burned up the dark hill of some country road as fast as its tiny little engine could carry two full sized gaijin (whiteys) and a weeks worth of paraphernalia. The speakers blasted psytrance in the form of the wildly discordant Cities of the Future. Emotions were running as high as they’d been for the entire trip, the party we’ve looked forward to for almost two months was a few kilometers away. A few kilometers of dark turns, cleaved into mountain fuming with sulfurous gases, the Earth’s colossal force slumbering for the time being, somewhere below the surface. We were told that asthmatics were advised not to even enter the region, as the air impurities could catalyze an attack.

We arrived a mere half hour after the music started but the initial two parking lots were already filled to the brim, and two grungy looking twenty somethings with light-rods led our two-door monster to a parking space on the grass down the hill from the ticket table.

I shouldered a backpack filled with some essential goodies and we headed up toward the party. At the ticket table we ran into a tiny snag, as they wanted to charge us extra because El Charro had forgotten the flyer we got at the last rave. However, the gathering’s maitre de of bump in the night, Hiro, was the man who gave me the flyer in the first place, and he remembered the only gaijin at the last rave, so after having a brief conversation with the girlfriend of one of the DJ’s we slowly lumbered up the next hill toward the rhythmic bass thuds ahead. This is a picture of me under the massive lumber arch which signalled the entrance to the campground some hours later in the night.

After about ten minutes of walking we began to see signs of life, not bodies twisting to the rhythmic thumps of the music, but arms rhythmically beating tent stakes into the ground, dozens of tents already setup and dozens more everywhere in the woods taking form as we walked past. Then next to a small bathroom the trail came to choke point before we entered a massive clearing, over a football field in width and at least twice that in length.

In the area around the back where we were standing and the right and left sides of this field were various distributors of such paltry, unimportant goods as food, water, and beer. Straight ahead of us, about 50 yards away, was a massive circular depression ringed with stone, where a half dozen Japanese guys were busy constructing what looked like the beginnings of a fire that might last twelve hours; which, consequently, it almost did, the fire burned well past dawn and nearly to noon. A short distance ahead of the fire pit was a small teepee which housed the mixing board and various technological knick-knacks, in front of that in a space about 50 meters long and twice as wide, about 100 Japanese ravers were getting their dance on. At the far end of the field, was a massive teepee under which the DJs of the evening would take turns spinning there wares to the general amusement of their adoring public.

It was still dusk when we had finished our initial exploration of our surroundings and we sat on the stone as they set the fire alight. Despite the fact that hard psy-trance was booming so loud it seemed like it must carry the entire 20 kilometer distance to the mouth of the mountain, the fire somehow lent the whole scene a sense of tranquility, despite the fact that a fire is essentially partially bottled chaos to begin with.
El Charro and I sat there with the initial beer in our hands before the onslaught of heavier fare when the scene was comically broken by a tall, long haired Japanese man dancing around the fire clad only in a blue bikini. The surreal nature of the gathering was starting to take form.

Through Hiro, the organizer, and the girl we spoke with at the entrance we began to make a few new Japanese raver friends, who set us on the course to satiate our more metaphysical appetites. Darkness had completely fallen, around 11 PM it seemed like most of the tents had been setup and the dance floor and fire pit began to accumulate fresh bodies. At this point it was hard not to feel like an outsider, considering we were the only gaijin in a group of about 400 people circulating the party. As the storm clouds of the mind began to metathesize in the blood the “dance floor” called.

El Charro and I then separated for periodic amounts of time, to dance, wander, or socialize as we saw fit. I dropped my bag in a corner somewhere, because it’s Japan, I could have left it in a stranger’s car and they would have put it on the ground before they drove off. Due to our complete lack of communicative skills in Japanese, the party became an internal, self-conscious, but still very fun trip for a few hours. That is, until a boat load of gaijin came onto the scene. A motley crew of Americans, Brits, a Frenchie, an Irish guy, and a Japanese girl fluent in English floated into the party. As this point we had people to socialize with, which made for much better transitions from “dancing” to sitting around the fire and talking.

The featured DJ of the party was an American born half-Japanese guy from San Francisco, and we were introduced by Hiro and quickly settled into a light hearted semi-circle so that we could pass the conversation along, to the right. The party was more or less your garden variety mountaintop Japanese rave during the night. There was one incredible visually stimulating aspect of this party though, the DJ’s were spinning at the edge of the clearing, and as such the area directly behind them was deep forest, and a dense tree line. Projected onto the tree-line behind the DJ’s was a psychedelic visualizer, something akin to your windows media player visuals, just a lot better, and it was the size of a movie screen projected onto the black foliage twenty feet in the air. Here's a blurry picture of it which does a horrible job of explaining it.

As the fire began its ultimate decay, having already burned almost all of its fuel, the sky began to enter that coquettish state of not knowing whether it was coming or going, whether the night was still hungering for darkness or ready to concede to something as simple as a floating ball of nuclear explosions. It was at this time that our surroundings were more accurately revealed to us. We stood upon a plateau maybe two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and although most of the clearing was ringed by the hilly slope of the mountain itself, or trees, one side was completely covered in beautiful flowers, and I could see an overwhelming distance across a valley to the tops of the other mountains in the range.

The music took no notice of the change in setting however, and continued blasting as if the party had started an hour ago. It was at this point, sitting around the stone belt the circled the fire, that a Japanese guy with long hair, clad only in leather pants, sandals, and a blue cape, danced over to me with a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand, and a joint in the other. Breakfast was served.

After slathering on some sunscreen in preparation for the onslaught of the summer sun I decided to go for a hike. Well it didn’t exactly happen like that, the hike more or less found me, as I was sitting with a notebook on a bridge near the parking lot. I noticed the bridge led to a path that went up the mountain, at the time there really wasn’t a choice.

The hike started with a narrow passageway like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, the rocky path was full of small stones that rolled away down the mountain as I walked, and I was completely encapsulated in a swath of bamboo, above me and to both sides. Severed stalks of bamboo jutted across the path at about eye level and the sunlight shining down on the leaves illuminated a fog of dust particles that made this area something like walking through a kind of ethereal curtain, solid and visible, but having no substance or resistance to my movement, like the gateway to a different world.

As I climbed a little higher, the intensity of the music began to diminish, and I was confronted with my first choice. I had come to a fork in the trail, and there was a rather interesting sign which looked like some kind of warning. Naturally I straddled the chain across the trail to the right and took the path less travelled, because the sign could have said nude women, and free cheeseburgers, I mean one can never be sure of these things. However, the sign apparently was a warning and after walking for a little while I was forced to retreat from a horde of naked women wielding delicious cheeseburgers. So I pressed on over the “real” trail.

The footpath which was previously concrete, broke, shattered and disappeared further up the trail, and then I came to a small clearing where a forgotten picnic table was conveniently placed, I assumed for sitting, and so I did. I once again opened my notebook and began to scribble as tiny red wood mites crawled along the white pages. The contents of said notebook are not to be revealed until my death, to what I assume can only be a legion of loyal followers. Sitting at the table the sounds of the mountain equaled the volume of the now distant music.

A short to long time later I stood up, left the table and continued climbing somewhat vertically along the side of the mountain, suddenly their was a roaring sound above my head that I couldn’t quite place. Then I saw it. The biggest god damned bumblebee any man on Earth has ever seen, its wings sounded like a helicopter, and it must have measured four inches long. The more I stared at it though, the odder it became, it wasn’t just massive, but the proportions of its being seemed wholly impossible. It would be akin to staring at a cruise ship hovering above you with nothing more than helicopter blades holding it aloft.

After the giant bug finally flew away, I realized I had climbed to a point where I could not hear the music anymore, near the top of the mountain. I sat down and scribbled some more into the journal, and remarked upon the irony of my situation. My goal had been to climb to the point where I couldn’t hear the music anymore, and I had achieved my goal, but now the problem was, that I couldn’t hear the music anymore.

However, after about twenty minutes of walking I had circled back to the original side of the mountain, and the music was ten times louder than before. I was almost directly over the camp, some thousand or so feet above, give or take a few hundred feet, to the point where the people weren’t really that visible, just the outlines of biggest features, and a mass of dancing dots somewhere near the middle. I turned around to go back down to the party. The only thing that happened on the way down is that I acquired a nifty little bamboo walking stick.

When I got back to the party I was in a fantastic mood, like a flower child coming back from something probably very much like this party, with different music. I danced around, I stole a soccer ball and tooled around with that, I bought about 6 bottles of water and drained them, and carried on with general frivolity for the better part of an hour, until I became rather bored with unbridled happiness and decided I was hungry. There was an attractive Japanese hippy chick making food of some kind or other near the back of the field, so I strolled over to her tent and got overcharged for some delicious concoction of what looked like couscous with some spices and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and other non-meat items. As I hadn’t eaten in about 14 hours, it tasted pretty damn good.


It was sometime in the next couple of hours that we decided we needed some kind of sleep, we’d been up a solid 24 to 26 hours already, and the music was not letting up in intensity, which was beginning to piss almost all of the white people off. What I’ve been told by El Charro, whose experience in these arena’s dwarfs my own, is that there is generally a much lighter set when the sun comes up, and not the continued hard pounding bass of the midnight hours.

The other gaijin (whitey’s) were camped out at the “hippy festival” somewhere near here. I have no idea what the hippy festival was, but by their description it was quieter, and we could crash in their tents for a little while, so we made our departure from the scene. We drove about 20 minutes, down the mountain, along some country roads, and eventually came to the remnants of the hippy festival. A French guy, Irish guy, 2 British girls, and a Japanese girl blasted off in a 60’s looking VW hippy van ahead of us, but we somehow arrived way before they did.

We hung out with a few American jets at the hippy festival grounds, which was slightly less auspicious than the psytrance rave, basically just a big field with some huge teepees built hither and thither, and most of the gathering had already cleared out. One of the Jets (people teaching in Japan for the JET program) happened to have a football with him, and I immediately goaded him into throwing it around with me for about a half hour. I hadn’t seen an American football since I left the states.

We had blankets, so we decided to join our new friends at Denny’s for some much needed diner fare. I don’t think anyone had eaten anything of substance in at least 12 hours. Before we left though, I saw something that may possibly be burned into my memory until I die.

As we got into our cars and turned around to leave, a white VW van, rumbled into site, going way to fast, spitting mud in all directions, and nearly tipping over as it came onto the grass. It was also blasting Rage Against the Machine at ear-splitting volumes. The motley, international group of strung out ravers plowed their way over to their tent, and we stopped and rolled the window down. I was talking to the tall, blonde British girl, who seemed quite attractive the night before, but now looked so strung out from various activities last night that she looked quasi-monstrous. She was making us promise to come back after the meal, which we had every intention of doing, and as we were talking, “Killing in the Name of” peaked. I started honking the horn in synch with the bass line and the last thing I will remember of this trip was as the girl leaned in to say, “We don’t really mesh well with the hippies,” a French guy and an Irish guy were screaming, “F*&! YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME,” over and over again into a head of broccoli, while a tiny British girl was honking the horn.

After we finished our meal at Denny’s and promised to e-mail each other etc…it began to rain. We were planning on taking a nap outside on what was a beautiful day and regenerating a bit, but now that would be impossible. El Charro and I had a little pow-wow, and despite being up for something like 32 hours straight, we decided to make the drive home, and pass out for a day before work started again. By the time we were back on the road again it had started raining…hard. The words torrential downpour would probably describe it best. That was the least of our worries however. We only needed to take one highway all the way back to our doorstep, and calculated it would take around 4 and a half to 5 hours based on our trip to where we were.

We hit the mother of all traffic jams, something like 300 meters away from Denny’s (Joyful). I was officially not happy anymore. We waited in traffic for about 40 minutes and we still weren’t even on the highway yet. We parked at 7-11 and bought about 30 dollars worth of sugar, caffiene, coffee, crack, ginseng, vitamin packs, etc…and got back on the road. The whole drive back, traffic would accumulate and then somehow the road would be empty for about a half hour. Just at the moment when we thought maybe this time the traffic had finally ended that it was smooth sailing home, we could bury the speedometer and make up some time, we would run into another endless pile of tiny white Japanese cars. After 7 hours of driving, multiple rest stops, and 40 sleepless hours of partying and driving and traveling my body had finally reached its limit. I pulled into the next rest stop, woke El Charro up and let him drive the final 2 hour leg home.

He dropped himself off and I drove the last 5 minutes from his house to mine. I didn’t unpack, I didn’t even bring my backpack in, I unlocked the door, took off my shoes, and dropped into bed. I woke up sometime around 7 PM the next day, and relaxed until work started the next day. The road trip had officially ended.