hokkaido highway blues hitchhiking japan

His first three books were plucked from the slush pile: he is the author of the satirical bestseller Why I Hate Canadians, which was all but banned from export (though it can be ordered online at chapters.ca, he advises), and his other works include a nuts-and-bolts traveller's bible, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Japan, as well as a humorous expos� about his experience in a misguided drunken government youth program, entitled I Was a Teenage Katima-victim! He has also written an insightful and highly scientific political analysis: Bastards & Boneheads (it was a study of our leaders). Read Online Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan BY : Will Ferguson. 'I have absolutely no sense of direction.'Ferguson has a BFA in screenwriting from York University, Toronto. Play tracks and discovery playlists tagged hitchhiking on SoundCloud desktop. Hokkaido highway blues : hitchhiking Japan Available at Main Library Main. Indeed, he prides himself on having gotten utterly and hopelessly lost in more than a dozen exotic locales, including Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea, and Japan.'How I ever became a travel writer is beyond me, ' he confesses. Hitchhiking may be an ancient mode of travel but in Japan it is considered. Fortunately, he managed to escape, and he has since travelled throughout Latin America and East Asia. Ferguson renders the encounters with wit, generous goodwill, and great hilarity.Will Ferguson was born and raised in the former fur-trapping settlement of Fort Vermilion in the backwoods of northern Canada. It is a journey full of adventure and the humor that is inevitably created when very different cultures collide.

The thought of hitchhiking so many hundred of miles is too unnerving, even for an appealing henna gaijin (weird foreigner). The tipsy host offers his best geographic advice and then a railroad ticket. He is picked up readily along the way, and is even taken home by a driver who feeds him and helps plot out the best route. He starts from a small metropolis where the local gardeners dust their petals because a nearby active and threatening volcano steadily sprinkles everything with ash. Like a cross between Spalding Gray and Dave Barry, Will Ferguson sets forth with thumb outstretched to race the mystical blooms northward. He follows the erupting front of cherry blossoms as they burst into bloom in a seasonal ripple that tantalizes the Japanese psyche each spring. Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking JapanĬultures collide when a Western journalist takes the slow road to Hokkaido.Īfter a few years of teaching in Japan, Will Ferguson set out to do the unthinkable-hitchhike the length of the country, from Cape Sata in the south to Hokkaido at the northernmost tip.

Hokkaido highway blues hitchhiking japan