Kamikōchi

Kamikōchi has been revered as Japan's answer to the Yosemite or Patagonia. Even I have neither been to Sierra Nevada nor South America, I have to agree that Kamikōchi is the Holy Grail for hiking enthusiasts. 

Situated at an elevation of 1,500 metres and along the banks of the crystal-clear Azusa-gawa, Kamikōchi is also known as the "Japanese Alps", a term popularised by the English missionary and conservationist Reverend Walter Weston. The town's popularity spiked in 1927 with the release of Kappa, a novella set in Kamikōchi and written by the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

My wife and I had an enjoyable four-hour walk in Kamikōchi today, eyeing the peaks of Mt Yake-dake and Mt Okuhotaka-dake. 

As your travel guide tells you, it wouldn't be Japan without the crowds. Timing is everything. To beat the crowd, we took our breakfast around 7 and caught the bus early. Many passengers got off the bus near Taishō-ike pond for leisure walk, and we decided to hike upriver to Myōjin-ike before heading back. While privacy may not be a big part of the hiking experience, perfect weather is. We counted ourselves exceptionally lucky to have Kamikōchi hiking on a day with the best sunny period within this week. 

Autumn

To call Shirakawa-gō a popular site would be a massive understatement. This is where iconic wooden farmhouse with steep, gabled thatched-roof designs are preserved. The Unesco World Heritage-listed villages are often filled with tourists. round the year. So much so that tourists vastly outnumber locals in Takayama.

As we headed to the famous Tenshukaku Observatory lookout, we had been prepared for disappointment because we weren't sure if it's closed. And it is. My wife decided to drive along the road instead of turning back. That would be a route different from what we had planned. As we followed the Google Map to head for Hida City, we'd noticed that we were having an epic drive along the Amou Mountain Pass. The 50-minute journey runs through Amou Prefecture Natural Park blessed with beautiful marshlands and bursts of autumn colours.

We didn't know how lucky we are until we checked the website: this road is going to be closed within one week as winter approaches. 

Monet

After years of struggling as an artist, Claude Monet became wealthy by the age of 43, when he could afford to rent a large garden 75 kilometres from Paris. That's how his passion for the pond in Giverny turned into the most impressive sights of waterlilies and weeping willows.

I was at least ten years older than Monet when I discovered a pond in Japan bearing an uncanny resemblance to the pond owned by the Father of Impressionism. My wife and I traveled to Gifu today, when our daughter took her school trip to Chengdu. 

Anyone with the slightest fondness for the famous painter's garden won't want to miss the pond known officially as "Namonaki-ike", meaning "the pond of no name." This breathtaking piece of nature has now earned the nickname "Monet's Pond." No doubt the drawcard for us is the much less costly airfare than that of flying to France. An extra bonus is to find peace and quiet around this pond; it's less famous and won't be swamped with tourists by busload. 

Anatomy

Flesh forgets: bone remember.

That's a famous quote from the forensic thriller writer Jon Jefferson. Sue Black, a Scottish forensic anthropologist and anatomist, cited this on the first page of her book Written in Bone.  

It has taken me almost one month to finish the book, which runs its chapters from brain box all the way to the foot. Being a doctor, I shouldn't have problem with reading her detailed depiction of bones with brutal trauma or finger bone crumbled to ashes after fire accident. 

Still, the stories are somewhat uncomfortable. That's too much for me to read too many chapters within a day. Reading forensic stories at bedtime is even worse, unless you're fine with being jolted awake suddenly at night. I would certainly hope not.

But then, occasionally, I read something that resonated with my personal experience. And probably that of many medical interns too. Sue talked about an oncology nurse who had spent so much time over the years trying to find the veins on the backs of patients' hands that she had come to recognise them by their hands and jewellery as much as by their faces. That's at least some sense of humanity.

ETC

Whether you're first-time visitor to Japan or a frequent flyer to Narita Airport, you can often be caught by surprise. There's an unmistakably wide range of etiquette. Shoes on stone, socks on wood. Onsen tidbits. Do's and don'ts on public transport. Japanese toilets for dummies. The list goes on and on.

The peculiarity of Japan has been a favourite topic of Western observers. I kept laughing when I read the book Abroad in Japan, written by Chris Broad. Chris is a British filmmaker and YouTuber who started his nerve-racking job teaching English in a foreign country without any knowledge of Japanese. 

His six-hour drive road trip to meet snow monkeys reminded me of our puzzle with the toll payment system few years ago. Both Chris and I didn't know their electronic chip system called ETC. That card, once inserted in the onboard unit inside the car, allows wireless toll payment along most of Japan's expressways and highways. Similar to Chris, we were trapped as my wife pulled up to a tollbooth with no means to pay with cash. We poked our head out of the window, flashed our credit card and kept failing to pay, We didn't understand any single sentence of what the Japanese toll booth operator was talking about.

The line of cars pulling up behind us could have been longer than those behind Chris. Anyhow, the long line of traffic ended up pushing both our family and Chris to drive throttle down the motorway without paying the toll. 

Like Chris, I will never forget the flame burning on the head of the toll-booth man who stood in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Uptime

Few tasks in history were as painfully eternal as that of Sisyphus, who kept rolling a boulder for eons. And the chance of calling an end to the repetitive cycle is zero. 

Yet I think emptying the email inbox in the modern era isn't any better task. Ever since human beings invented this communication tool, we have been destined to get caught up in the never-ending cycle of scrolling, checking notifications of the mail box, and opening unread emails.

As much as it pains me to admit it, I have been messy in managing the incoming emails. If you recall unanswered mails that you had expected from me, you aren't alone. In case there is a fine for owing each person's reply mail, I should have applied for bankruptcy years ago. Ask my secretary and she will testify the number of my debts (not to mention her secret wish that each hundred of reminders can earn her travel mileage). 

Call me procrastinator or lazy, but a handful of practical tips have recently brought joy back to working through my inbox. First I learned from my mentor how to avoid distraction from checking mails too frequently and too randomly. His strategy of checking emails only two or three times a day is eye-opening.  Next, my boss shared with me his approach to writing and responding to emails. In short, he keeps the emails short (not more than two lines) and responds to all emails within twenty-four hours. He always reply to emails quickly to let the sender know that he received the email, what he plans to do about it, and when. Neat.

To this end, the best lessons have come from Laura Mae Martin, Google's Executive Productivity Advisor, who wrote the book Uptime. Her laundry method of handling emails is simple and neat. That means creating three laundry baskets for my inbox. The three essential baskets refer to Respond (those emails that require a response and need my time to complete), Read (something that I'd like to read but don't need to respond to), and Revisit (something that I cannot immediately respond to because I'm waiting for a specific time to check in or I'm waiting for someone else to respond). I learn to sort the incoming mails like sorting my laundry, folding clothes, hanging clothes, and matching socks. 

Talk about inefficient use of energy and time, and you can imagine the random laundry sorting. That would be like opening a dryer door, picking out one shirt, folding the shirt, going to put in dresser, walking back to the dryer to find a pair of pants but throw it back because it still seems a bit damp, finding one sock but don't feel like hunting for the other sock, switching gear to find a pair of pants - oh wait, it's the same pair of damp pants I already touched, and on and on.

Hike

Hiking or running is the only sport – the only one I know of, anyway – for which you need nothing more than a pair of shoes. It may be true that, in most circumstances, you can find someone to go together. Sure, you might. 

If I go hiking, I can go on my own, or with family and friends. Hiking alone entails a healthy dose of strenuous exercise. My solo hiking can often go as much as 20 kilometres' walk, double the usual distance covered with companion.

Which is why I have downloaded a mobile phone app designed by Hong Kong police. The track function and rescue signal from the app, after successfully passing a field test in a Dubai desert, should have better safety for hikers.

In the first week of October, I hiked for six hours, from Tai Po Kau Nature Reserve to Ng Tung Chai Waterfalls via MacLehose Trail. Two weeks later, I hiked with my secondary school friends and started our trek near Ng Tung Chai, heading for Tai To Yan (or "Big Knife Cliff" in Chinese). When I emerged on a ridge at the ninth highest peak in Kong Kong with sweeping views over Sha Tau Kok, I could see all the way to Shenzhen in the north. Little did I know, just two days later, I'd be hiking to that area, close to the village near Kai Kuk Shue Ha with my wife and daughter.

And yes, the mercury hasn't seemed to dip even it's October now. Yet one thing is certain. I have had the good fortune and opportunity to enjoy the hikes.