I Love Wasting Ink

October 24 · 14 km · 182.3 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → Here’s a good way to instantly recognize Hui restaurants, even if you don’t notice the headscarves worn by the women, or the absence of pork and beer in the fridge: like…

October 23 · 42.5 km · 168.3 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → On my way out of the city, the park is busy with people playing board games and badminton.

October 22 · 16.7 km · 125.8 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → In all the years that I spent walking around Japan, I thought of it as the perfect place to work as a civil engineer: a desire for really nice infrastructure combined…

October 21 · 36.7 km · 109.1 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → The streets of Niulian are no longer marked on any map, and they twist down to the shore in walls of red mudbrick made of rice straw and snail shells, many now crumbli…

October 20 · 0 km · 72.4 km total Over the years, as I’ve drifted deeper into the delights of Chinese cuisines, I’ve come to admire Chinese Cooking Demystified, a blog about…not exactly that.

October 19 · 18.9 km · 72.4 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → For the first time on this journey it’s muggy and overcast, not that it bothers the men out fishing.

October 18 · 32 km · 53.5 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → A small river, or is it a canal, leads towards the lake, landscaped and lined with the infrastructure of leisure.

October 17 · 21.5 km · 21.5 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → The city at lunch hour: a symphony of noodle-slurping.

The landscapes are all AI, highland villages melding fantastically into the snow peaks of the Hengduan Mountains, the fields acid-bright with biodiversity, tended to by natives waving to high-speed trains, and they go on forever, proportioned for a person…

Are we getting anything done here?

You must have seen those gear photos purportedly showing people preparing for a big adventure, everything carefully laid out on a grid with an eye on the camera’s frame.

On long drives through the countryside, back home from our summer house or my grandmother’s house, my mother would stop the car1 by the side of the road, walk into the weeds that lined the edges of cultivated fields, and gather a large bouquet of wildflow…

Later, when I was sitting in a daze at the kitchen table with Tõnu, and his wife Stella and a friend returned from the bog with their loot of cloudberries and bilberries, I realized that every project needs a grand entrance, and I had just arranged for mi…

For some months I had plans to go to the north of Spain to see the total eclipse of the Sun on August 12.

October 17· 8.4 km · 194 km total Map data © OpenStreetMap · Open map in Gaia GPS → PHOTOS 1 📍 Kunming 昆明 VIGNETTE 1 PHOTOS 2 📍 Kunming 昆明 VIGNETTE 2 PHOTOS 3 📍 Kunming 昆明 VIGNETTE 3

I’m writing to let you know I’m shutting down the Data Reduction 9K blog, which I began writing in spring of this year and haven’t updated since May.

Who first had the idea of folding red-hot iron, and discovered that when the red-hot iron is mixed with burning charcoal the result will be carbonised steel?

It’s been a while since I last wrote, and the project has had its fair share of setbacks and distractions, some of them very productive, others not so much.

Peter here, the guy who’s no longer walking around Japan but sitting on a succession of very low Japanese chairs in Sapporo thinking about writing about walking around Japan.

Early on in Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a book about China at the turn of the century, the author has a drink in Beijing with Imre Galambos, a scholar of ancient Chinese texts: In his dissertation, Galambos notes that centuries of historians have been o…

Two things I’ve learned since my previous post: A chicken dinner from May 2017 made me realize the utter impossibility of what I’m trying to do here.

On the morning of April 13, 2017, I walked out of my friend Sahar Ghavidel’s house in the southern Japanese city of Kagoshima, pushed my bike a few blocks down the street and left it in the parking lot of a dormitory for another friend, ate a breakfast si…

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard from me since October 2023, when I was walking around Japan.

A good day to you all from aboard the Blue Luminous, floating somewhere on the black waters of the Straits of Tsugaru (home to bluefin tuna, American nuclear submarines, and deranged long-distance swimmers), about to head into the bay and towards Aomori C…

“Around Japan?”

I’m going on a walk.

A quick reminder that this coming Monday, on July 17 at 7 PM JST, I will be speaking about my past — and future!

My apologies for the extended radio silence.

The third post from Human Again, my series of dispatches from a walk in northern Japan, is now online.

The second post from Human Again, my series of dispatches from a walk in northern Japan, is now online.

Hello from the southern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, a few days’ walk from the La Pérouse Strait, which separates Hokkaido from Sakhalin and will mark the point where I turn south.

I dreamed of walking back, under wedges of red-crowned cranes returning from the north, along the rice harvests of Tōhoku under azure autumnal skies […] On August 21, 2017, five years and a day ago, I reached the easternmost end of Japan after four months…

“Walk forever?”

On an afternoon in August 2017, a few days after I had walked from one end of Japan to the other, I met Timothy Harris, an Englishman of many trades — actor, director, translator, editor, diction coach — who has lived in Japan since the 1970s.

In my last letter I mentioned that I would write in March about the next parts of These Walking Dreams, my visual field diary about a long walk in Japan.

If you’re reading this letter, you likely had something to do with that book I wrote three years ago, the one about a short walk in Japan called The Wilds of Shikoku.

One year ago I flew through the night due east, mad with life and terrified, to walk through the mountains of Shikoku and write a book about it.

The PDF edition of The Wilds of Shikoku is almost done.

As some of you may have already noticed, the print edition of The Wilds of Shikoku is done.

Of the thirteen thousand five hundred and six words which make up the final version of my field report on walking across Shikoku, there isn’t any which gives me such joy as the 13,507th, which is Shikoku-beliv-2019-08-12-PRINT.pdf.

“And we are right on track to have it all printed by the end of June,” I wrote a month ago, and while we’re not quite there yet, The Wilds of Shikoku is nearing completion.

On few occasions have I felt as prophetic as when I mentioned my fear of “endless rounds of edits” in the last update.

On clear days in Tbilisi, of which there have been two in the month that I’ve lived here, you can walk to the upper slopes of the botanical gardens and look straight into the heart of the Central Caucasus.