My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (28 page)

The line of the climbers’ lights now reached up to the summit and down to the seventh Eighth Station, where it vanished into the fog. The rain was falling in gobs, coming down harder and harder, and the fog was building up into a solid white wall; I would never have known we’d reached the summit except that Mr. Watanabe said we’d reached the summit and should stop at a shelter and have something to eat. The crater was there but I couldn’t see it, and the whole of Japan was spread out underneath us but you’d never know it, and there were scores of people all around us but I couldn’t make them out even though they were probably just a few feet away. I didn’t really care. I was completely thrilled just to be on the summit. I was the highest thing in Japan! I wanted to run around the crater, but the wind had picked up to about sixty miles an hour, which would have meant running sideways, if at all.

It is traditional for climbers to mail a letter at the Mount Fuji post office on the summit and to hike around the crater to each of the two shrines on the rim before descending. Mr. Watanabe suggested we should skip the post office and the shrines and simply head down right away. I wanted to stay. We held a vote and it was a tie, but then the wind punched me so hard that I changed my mind. I got the official summit brand burned into my walking stick and then started down into the fog, sliding heel first into the loose pumice, the sheets of rain in my face.

FOR A WHILE
,
everyone who saw Mount Fuji wanted to write a poem about it or tell a story or make pictures of it. It was described by a writer in the eighth century as “a lovely form capped with the purest white snow . . . reminding one of a well-dressed woman in a luxuriously dyed garment with her pure white undergarments showing around the edge of her collar”—in other words, like a lady with her bra straps showing. Unquestionably, the consummate Fuji artist was the nineteenth-century printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, who made pictures of the peak for seventy years. Hokusai often called himself a crazed art addict and sometimes used the name Hokusai the Madman.
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,
a collection of his prints, was published around 1823 and was a huge hit in Japan. Hokusai depicted Fuji covered with snow, half-covered with snow, bare, hidden by mist, capped with an umbrella cloud, in nice weather, with pilgrims climbing, with storks bathing in front of it, as seen from the bow of a boat, and viewed from a bridge in Tokyo. In some of the pictures the mountain fills up most of the space, whereas in others it is just a pucker on the horizon while the foreground is dominated by geisha girls loafing around or a guy building a barrel or someone trying to talk his horse into walking over a bridge. A few years later, when Hokusai was seventy-four and worried about his career, he recharged it by publishing a new collection,
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.
It was another huge hit. Hokusai was an inconstant man who moved ninety-three times in his life and changed his name twenty times, but for the seventy years he made pictures of Fuji, his image of the mountain never changed; it was always steep sided, narrow peaked, wide bottomed, solitary, and simply the loveliest mountain you could ever hope to see.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, Mr. Watanabe apologized for the weather and said he very much wanted me to come back so I could see Mount Fuji on a good day—that is, so I could see Mount Fuji at all. I told him that I wasn’t the least bit disappointed and that anyway this seemed like the Japanese way of seeing the mountain, less with my eyes than with my mind’s eye. I was a material climber, but I had been won over to the conceptual side.

If we wanted a view, I told him, we could always go back to the Ferris wheel at Fujikyu Highland. “I suppose,” Mr. Watanabe said. “However, I do not believe we will have the time or opportunity to ride such a vehicle.” He was right, so we just blotted our soaked clothes and kicked the pebbles out of our boots and caught the next bus back to Tokyo, and before I left Japan I bought myself a copy of Hokusai’s
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Game Plan

Millie, a spiny anteater with Betty Boop eyes, is the homeliest of the Olympic mascots and also the least athletic. I went to see a real Millie the other day at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and waited an hour for it to exert itself—to run or walk or do rhythmic gymnastics or even to lap up an army of ants with its tongue, which is what spiny anteaters do best, even though ant lapping is not yet a recognized Olympic sport—but this Millie wasn’t moving. The Summer Olympics were only a few weeks away, but it was still sharply cold in Sydney, and most of the animals at the zoo had their noses tucked under their tails and their backs to the snappy wind. Even in the finest weather, though, spiny anteaters (or echidnas, as they are properly known) are clumsy-looking mammals the size of bowling balls, who toddle around like little drunks and roll up, spines bristling, when they get upset. They are not what you would call “sporty.” The other two official Olympic mascots, Syd the platypus and Olly the kookaburra, are much more athletic than Millie but just as peculiar. Kookaburras are small, husky king-fishers that laugh hysterically at absolutely anything. Platypuses, with their big beaks, furry bodies, flat tails, and webbed feet, look like what mothers always warn you will happen if you buy separates rather than a nice outfit. However un-Olympian Millie, Syd, and Olly may be, they are plastered all over Sydney in what has been described as the biggest Olympics marketing effort in history; you cannot walk down a Sydney street without encountering an Olly stationery set, a Syd bumbag, a Millie sunvisor, or a sheet of stickers showing Olly playing basketball, Syd swinging a bat, and Millie—sluggish, nearly immobile Millie—gaily tapping a Ping-Pong ball. “I’m a typical Australian,” Millie says in a children’s book explaining her Olympic career move. “I’m tough, clever and occasionally a bit spiky. I’m an expert at my chosen occupation, namely digging, and I really like my food.”

Everyone I met in Australia seemed awfully cranky about the Olympics. Maybe sour moods are typical in cities about to host events that are expensive and complicated and guaranteed to tangle traffic for weeks, but Australians seem to have brought cynicism to record-breaking new heights. One of the few things anyone raved about to me was the fact that Air New Zealand was offering a special, all-time-low round-trip airfare out of Australia during the two weeks of the Games. Another was an acidly satirical television series called
The Games,
about the machinations of the local Olympic committee. Otherwise, attitudes seemed to span the range from indifference to despair. This summer, a new website, www.silly2000.com, was launched to further skewer Sydney 2000; its motto is “Keeping You Sane Through the Games,” and the site includes a countdown to the end of the Olympics and mock stories on equestrian hooliganism and where to buy guns and fast food in Sydney.

I had arrived in Australia expecting—dreading, actually—Olympic delirium, since Australians are usually portrayed as unironic enthusiasts. Once I got over my surprise at their cynicism, though, it struck me as perfectly appropriate; this is, after all, a post-Salt-Lake-City-scandals Olympics. What was going around was a distaste for the local Olympic Committee, antipathy toward the corporate nature of the Games, annoyance at the logistics of the thing, and a bit of anticipatory defensiveness about whether Sydney can actually pull it off.

“We’re probably going to be reading a lot of nasty stories about Sydney now,” a talk show host said to me, sighing heavily. Nasty stories about Sydney, one of the most beautiful, pleasant cities on the planet?

“Ha-ha,” I answered, assuming he was kidding.

He sighed again and said, “Well, I guess we have it coming.” (There have, it seems, been goof-ups. The Sydney medals, for example, appear to depict the Colosseum in Rome rather than the Parthenon in Greece, the birthplace of the Games. “The Australians,” sniffed
Avriani,
a Greek daily, “have confused a sports arena with a public execution arena.”)

Even children in Australia are being inoculated against Olympic fever. I figured that Kokey Koala, the main character in
Kokey Koala and the Bush Olympics,
would embody heroics and prowess, until I turned the book over and read, “Watch Kokey’s disasters as he participates in the Bush Olympics.”

The general grumpiness about the event meant that it was still possible, four weeks before the opening ceremonies, to get tickets to just about anything you wanted—that is, unless Australian postal workers went on strike, as they were threatening to do, and refused to deliver any Olympic tickets unless they got a special bonus.(Sydney hotel workers, keeping pace with the post office, staged a walkout for an Olympic bonus as well.) “We were glad when we got it, so let’s get into it!” one radio campaign scolded.

My first night in Sydney, I flipped on the television and saw a commercial that showed an elderly man sitting in a stark white room, talking mournfully into the camera. At first, I thought it was one of those public service ads urging you to wear seat belts or quit smoking, because the man looked so depressed. “No, I didn’t go to the Olympics in 8217;56,” he was saying, referring to the last time Australia hosted the Games, in Melbourne. And, he went on, his life had been a welter of regret ever since. “Rarely do you get a second chance in a lifetime,” he said. “Why would you pass up that opportunity?” Which of course meant, “You will never, ever outlive the remorse and sorrow that I guarantee you if you don’t at least go to a water-polo match or something.” Maybe the ads will work eventually, but for the moment, the
Sydney Morning Herald
’s “Holiday Accommodation” classified section still listed apartments far from Sydney, under the headline
ESCAPE THE OLYMPICS!

WHEN IT COMES TO OLYMPIANS
rather than Olympics, everyone cheers up. There were billboards all over town featuring Cathy Freeman, the Aborigine runner who won a silver medal in Atlanta, and daily reports on Ian Thorpe, the seventeen-year-old swimmer, nicknamed Thorpedo, whose stupendous foot size is a matter of national pride. As cool as they are about the Olympics, Australians are mad about sports. They surf and swim and golf and ride and sail, and they play tennis and cricket and soccer, and they totally worship “footy”—Australian Rules football, a rugbylike concoction derived from an Aborigine game called
marngrook.
“Sport is a prime metaphor for Australian life,” the art critic and historian Robert Hughes writes in the Sydney Games official souvenir program—which is called, inventively enough, “Official Souvenir Program”—”and because of it, many of our heroes (we don’t have a lot) are sportsmen and women.” In fact, six of the ferries to the Olympic venue in Homebush are named in honor of Australian Olympic athletes. Another hero might have been Richard Kevan Gosper, a working-class Sydneysider who won first place in the 440-yard sprint in the 1954 Commonwealth Games; a silver medal in track at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics; and a place on the Australian team in the 1960 Olympics, in Rome. Might have been, that is, if Gosper—now the most senior Australian Olympic official—hadn’t queered his reputation by taking an eighteen-thousand-dollar ski vacation in Salt Lake City in 1993, a potential violation of International Olympic Committee rules. (He was finally cleared of any wrongdoing after five months of investigation.) Then, to forever ensure his lack of popularity in Australia, he allowed his daughter Sophie to accept an invitation to be the first Australian in the torch relay, bumping a young girl who had originally been chosen for the spot. Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph
suggested that Gosper’s name was actually an acronym for Greedy Obstinate Selfish Pompous Egotistical Reptile.

Except for the Sophie Gosper incident, the torch relay has been one of the happiest parts of the proceedings. As the torch has been circling the country, newspapers have been publishing maps showing its route, along with lists of the names of the various runners, most of whom are ordinary blokes, minor athletic heroes, community standouts, and kids. But even the relay has had snarls. Some joker tried to douse the torch with a fire extinguisher, and smart alecks have been lighting cigarettes from it. One town, Tingha, was so offended by being bypassed that its citizens conspired to pinch some of the flame with a homemade torch. Another town, Nimbin, in northern New South Wales, felt that it was deliberately left off the route because of its notoriety as a marijuana center and the fear that there would be too much enthusiasm for lighting joints from the Olympic torch. The manager of a local backpackers’ hotel was quoted as saying, “The hemp Olympics come here, not the flame ones.”

ON MY LAST DAY
in Sydney, I went to Olympic Park in Homebush Bay, about fifteen miles west of the center of the city. From downtown, the easiest way to Homebush is by RiverCat, a long ferryboat that slips noiselessly from Circular Quay, beside the white half-shell of the Sydney Opera House, down the Parramatta River to Gladesville and Chiswick and Darling Harbour and Kissing Point and, eventually, to Homebush. The banks of the river are ragged, with long grooves and deep coves and jigsawed inlets and bays. Homebush is on a chunk of low, flat land shaped like the head of a golden retriever. The area has had an inglorious past. Besides being the site of a former racetrack, Homebush consisted of a drab collection of suburban bungalows, brick factories, and railroad tracks. For forty years, Homebush Bay and the surrounding wetlands were used as a dump for domestic garbage, construction debris, and commercial waste, including petroleum, tar sludge, asbestos, heavy metals, and dioxins. So much waste was deposited that the landscape was permanently redrawn. The area was considered, in the most generous terms, “highly degraded.” After six years and a hundred and thirty-seven million dollars, it is now a green, or at least greenish, mostly man-made landscape called Millennium Parklands, replanted with native grasses and casuarina trees, and pocked with twenty-two man-made ponds. Even the most ornery of Australians would have to agree that this aspect of hosting the Olympics has been a success.