Reggie Thomson’s Diary

Everything was packed by about 7 p.m. I had hoped to leave by three, but as always, time drags on. My belongings come to just under 15 kilograms, not including the packet of biscuits from Nie.

I chose to walk along the main road that leads to Takasago, but it is a four-lane road, and the cars just whizzed passed. I was over the bridge before I was offered a lift by a young lady. She took me to the North Kakogawa junction. There she handed me some strawberry pokky and other biscuits, saying they were too sweet for her.

The junction was quite a deserted place, but I eventually got going and started service-station aiming to get to Gotemba in Shizuoka by about 5 a.m. I think I slept a little in some of the rides.

In just a few days, the wild adventure gets underway. Even now, I’m not sure where the first destination is. Rain and snow will soon blow in to Japan from the northeast. I shall travel with the sun, in search of beauty.

I am a fair-weather photographer, my hobby is also hitchhiking, and I shall be travelling with a portable IBM computer. The aim is to search for beauty.

An amateur photographer who takes landscape and cityscape photos, is hardly an artist. The real artists are the architects and designers who create the buildings, or the skilled craftsmen who meticulously chisel and saw the temples and shrines, or the One who paints the sky with such wondrous colours in the mornings and evenings and adds the gloss to the green leaves with the rain. No, a photographer merely tries to capture the aesthetically pleasing angle or colour or fall of the light.