Kyushu Hitching Pics

Hitching at night time was difficult. I would not want to pick up someone who looked like this, but surprisingly people almost always stopped for us regardless of the time or the place. If you get stuck out in the country at night, though, you may have to set up camp.

This is my hitching partner, Mr. Jamie Mackay of Georgia. For some unknown reason, I prefer to introduce him as “James” (no one ever calls him that) to Japanese people.

When we saw that the sun was going down in Fukuoka, we knew that it was time to hit the road. Hitching out of big cities isn’t easy, but we did it.

This guy picked us up around Hakata, and drove us to Karatsu. Whenever we would bring up a city in Kyushu or southern Honshu that we had visited, he would always say “Oooh, the girls in (name of city) are beautiful.” and then name off the price of how much an “oral massage” costs there. He was a nice guy, but he complained of being hard on cash. Of course you’re gonna be low on funds if you skip work to play pachinko and go to Soapland every weekend!

This is Mr. Tanaka of Karatsu. He picked us up as we were walking down a road in Saga toward Nagasaki. I was able to have a really deep conversation with him, and he told me to consider him my Japanese father and then told me to tell my real father hello.

On the ferry from Taira-machi (on the southern peninsula of Nagasaki) to Nagasu (about an hour North of Kumamoto City), this girl and her mother started asking if I had a sister at Daiichi High School. I was confused because I thought they were talking about Merin at first, but it turns out that I look like her good friend’s brother. It’s funny because I teach her classmates through the Virtual High School program (and another one of the students was convinced that I was a member of her favorite Japanese R and B/Hip hop group “Da Pump” until I spoke in English to her).

We got stuck in a random town in Southern Saga late at night on a road with no traffic and so we had to find a low key place to camp. We settled on a small cluster of trees next to some tea fields, and started getting paranoid that we had been spotted when some cars seemed to stop right next to our tent and idle for a length of time.