I had no idea sleeping on the floor could be so not unpleasant. Until I came to Japan, that is, where it’s not a punishment from your angry girlfriend or something stupid you do when you’re too drunk to walk to the bed but is an end in itself, and a darned comfortable one at that.

At a ryokan – a traditional Japanese inn – in Nagano three weeks ago, I was first given a tour of the building, including the small onsen and a bathroom with fancy Western-style toilets (no squatting!). Then I was shown through a sliding fusuma door to a small room with a low table flanked by two cushions, a kerosene space heater, and a single window. The ancient, bent Japanese woman who was with me carefully made me a cup of bitter green tea at the table, then told me to sit. While I sipped the tea (it’s drunk neat, without sugar or cream), she unrolled a futon across the tatami floor and made my bed. In America, a futon is a sort of uncomfortable folding couch. In Japan, a futon is not that at all; it’s a thin mattress about two meters long that lies directly on the tatami – rectangular reed mats that have covered Japanese floors since approximately 1,000,000 B.C. It comes with a thick blanket and, if you’re lucky, a tiny pillow about the size of a fashion magazine. It all makes for an excellent night of sleep, especially when you’ve got a belly full of noodles and the window’s open and there’s an autumn chill in the night air and you’ve been walking around a foreign city all day gawking yourself into exhaustion.

In Takayama this weekend – the name means “high mountain” – I met up with my itinerant mountaineering compadre Will and we stayed at a temple inn called Zenkoji, which is technically the name of the temple, but the inn’s attached to the temple, and the friendly Mako-lookalike proprietor, Tommy, who maintains both temple and inn, doesn’t see a need for two names, which is his prerogative. Tatami-and-futon dorm rooms were what Zenkoji and Tommy offered, and I slept like a dog.

Takayama’s way up in the mountains, split by an ice-cold river and ringed on every side by distant towers of rock that cup the city like the hands of stone giants. This is a city that’s built for snow; roofs are all angled like church steeples and the trees are squat, gnarled and hunched over themselves. The city’s been around for ages, part of the old post road between Kyoto and Tokyo. The once magnificent castle on the hill overlooking the town was torn down when a new ruling clan took over the Hida region in 1693 and decided to kick some Takayama ass – about the time the earliest Charlestonians were thinking it would be nice to move out of the West Ashley woods and into a bigger place on the peninsula.

In fact Takayama’s a lot like Charleston’s historic district. It’s riddled with well-preserved old buildings, cobbled streets, souvenir and craft shops, fine art and folk museums, scads of restaurants, and of course plagues of tourists, who wander through streets and automobile thoroughfares like they’re in a theme park. (I’m including myself in this category – it’s even trickier avoiding being run over when you keep forgetting cars are coming at you on the opposite side of the street.) It felt a lot like home.

On Sunday, an hour and a half further east and up, I found Kamikochi to be not so much a town as a merely bus stop and an information center cowering in the Asawaga River valley beneath a half-dozen of the Japanese Alps’ most spectacular peaks. These include 3,190-meter-high Hotakadake, which hangs in the sky at the end of the valley, draped in white, exhaling mist, and radiating majesty in palpable waves. I hiked up the valley to the Kappa-bashi bridge and Myojin-ike pond and by the time I’d returned five and a half hours later, my legs were stiff and my neck ached from looking up all day, as if the mountains had reached down and held my face toward them. For some reason I hardly noticed my foot at all.

Here are a few images from Takayama. I’m not sure how I feel about this slideshow thing. But it’ll have to do until I can figure out how to edit CSS and get some permanent photo galleries created on here. Feel free to provide your own opinion. Just remember, nobody likes a complainer.

[slideshow id=432345564249720050&w=426&h=320]

Just back from three exhausting days in Takayama. The foot held up courageously, but the rest of the body feels like a bruised potato. I’ll write about it all tomorrow. For the moment, I’m begging off with a slideshow of photos from a daytrip on Sunday to Kamikochi, in the deep, wild interior of the Alps. Next time, I’m bringing a tent. And chapstick.

[slideshow id=504403158287298526&w=426&h=320]

One of the drawbacks of glamorous international travel is that you’ve constantly got to be wowing the folks back home. The peanut gallery’s always hungry for a vicarious thrill, and they set the bar high. They watch the Travel Channel, they’ve read National Geographic Adventure. Just you’re being there isn’t enough for them. They want to hear about some travel, by god! You went to South Africa? Did you go cage diving with the Great Whites? Oh, that’s a shame … maybe next week, yes? How’s Hawaii? Have you taken one of those helicopter rides around the rim of an erupting volcano? Well, why not? The volcano’s not going to come to you, you know.

Fukui’s not exactly the crossroads of Japan, but it is awfully central to things. Even if the city’s not much of an end point, it’s an excellent place to travel from. Just 41 miles (or 66 kilometers, if you insist) along the coast to the north lies Kanazawa, an overlooked gem of an ancient city that most visitors miss because it’s far from the Tokyo-Nagoya-Kyoto-Hiroshima line. Triple that distance to the south and east gets you to the old capital of Kyoto, the crown jewel in Japan’s cultural dowry, as well as nearby Osaka and Nara. Two hundred miles and a three-hour bullet-train ride to the opposite coast is Tokyo itself: hyperbolic, hello-kitty-cute, switched-on and serene. Eight or so miles to the west, the Sea of Japan nuzzles the nation’s midsection, carving out a delicate string of beaches and inlets from the twisting stretch of overhanging cliffs and upended rocks known as the Ichizen Coast.

If it’s an adrenaline rush you’re after, though – the kind that comes with sheer drops and snow-capped heights, alpine steeps and bottomless rock canyons, gondola lifts and rope bridges, infinite vistas across the spine of the world and such – then you’re going to want to point yourself east, at the 1,000-square-mile scrum of glorious tectonic pandemonium known as the Japanese Alps. They’re home to innumerable tiny historic resorts and onsen (including Nagano on the northern edge of the range, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics), a score of the highest peaks in Japan, and some of the best snowskiing and hiking in the world.

That’s where I’m headed this weekend, bum foot or no.

Three weeks ago I took a series of trains to Nagano. From there, I’d hoped to explore a couple of the tiny nearby ski resorts like Hakuba and Togakushi, which during the summer and fall are great for hiking. The mountains decided otherwise, though, and it rained all weekend. As if to compensate for this, karma saw to it that I bump into Will Banff, an Australian teacher who’s been living in Osaka for four years, but who’s taken a six-month sabbatical from teaching to climb 100 of Japan’s biggest hills. Not just any 100, though. Will’s trek is modeled on a famous book by writer, poet, and mountaineer Kyūya Fukada, whose 1964 guide 100 Famous Mountains of Japan has been taken as a personal challenge by rush-seekers and risk-takers since its publication, Will being just the latest example.

Will was halfway through the list when I met him, having arrived in Nagano that weekend to tackle mountains 52-54. Over a few beers that evening, we agreed on a title for the book about the trip we’d decided to collaborate on: Heading for the Hills. (If you have a better idea, by all means send it along.) This weekend, Will is hunkered down in an alpine city not far from here called Takayama, which he plans to use as a base camp for tackling a clutch of local peaks and which I’ve been looking for an excuse to visit since I arrived. With the fall colors expected to be approaching an incandescent level of ostentation this weekend, I think it’s incumbent on me to say the hell with the foot and jump, as it were, on a train bound for Takayama as soon as I can hobble to the station.

Let the peanut gallery chew on that.

One of the drawbacks of glamorous international travel is that you’ve constantly got to be wowing the folks back home. The peanut gallery’s always hungry for a vicarious thrill, and they set the bar high. They watch the Travel Channel, they’ve read National Geographic Adventure. Just you’re being there isn’t enough for them. They want to hear about some travel, by god. You went to South Africa? Did you go cage diving with the Great Whites? Oh, that’s a shame … maybe next week, yes? How’s Hawaii? Have you taken one of those helicopter rides around the rim of an erupting volcano? Well, why not? The volcano’s not going to come to you, you know.

Fukui’s not exactly the crossroads of Japan, but it is awfully central to things. Even if the city’s not much of an end point, it’s an excellent place to travel from. Just 41 miles (or 66 kilometers, if you insist) along the coast to the north lies Kanazawa, an overlooked gem of an ancient city that most foreign visitors miss because it’s well off the Tokyo-Nagoya-Kyoto-Hiroshima line. Triple that distance to the south and east gets you to the old capital of Kyoto, the crown jewel in Japan’s cultural dowry, as well as nearby Osaka and Nara. Two hundred miles and a three-hour bullet-train ride to the opposite coast is Tokyo itself: hyperbolic, hello-kitty-cute, switched-on and serene. Eight or so miles to the west, the Sea of Japan nuzzles the nation’s midsection, carving out a delicate string of beaches and inlets from the twisting stretch of overhanging cliffs and upended rocks known as the Ichizen Coast.

If it’s an adrenaline rush you’re after, though – the kind that comes with sheer drops and snow-capped heights, alpine steeps and bottomless rock canyons, gondola lifts and rope bridges, infinite vistas across the spine of the world and such – then you’re going to want to point yourself east, at the 1,000-square-mile scrum of glorious tectonic pandemonium known as the Japanese Alps. They’re home to innumerable tiny historic resorts and onsen (including Nagano on the northern edge of the range, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics), a score of the highest peaks in Japan, and some of the best snowskiing and hiking in the world.

That’s where I’m headed this weekend, bum foot or no.

Three weeks ago I took a train about three hours northeast to Nagano. From there, I’d hoped to explore a couple of the tiny nearby ski resorts like Hakuba and Togakushi, which during the summer and fall are great for hiking. The mountains decided otherwise, though, and it rained all weekend. As if to compensate for this, karma saw to it that I bump into Will Banff, an Australian-raised English teacher who’s been living in Osaka for four years, but who’s taken a six-month sabbatical from teaching to climb 100 of Japan’s biggest hills. Not just any 100, though. Will’s trek is modeled on a famous book by writer, poet, and mountaineer Kyūya Fukada, whose 1964 guide 100 Famous Mountains of Japan has been taken as a personal challenge by rush-seekers and risk-takers since its publication, Will being just the latest example.

Will was halfway through the list when I met him, having arrived in Nagano that weekend to tackle mountains 52-54. Over a few beers that evening, we agreed on a title for the book about the trip we’d decided to collaborate on: Heading for the Hills. (If you have a better idea, by all means send it along.) This weekend, Will is hunkered down in an alpine city not far from here called Takayama, which he plans to use as a base camp for tackling a clutch of local peaks and which I’ve been looking for an excuse to visit since I arrived. With the fall colors expected to be approaching an incandescent level of ostentation this weekend, I think it’s incumbent on me to say the hell with the foot and jump, as it were, on a train bound for Takayama as soon as I can hobble to the station.

Let the peanut gallery chew on that.

Say hello to my little friends.

The good news: my heel’s not broken. The bad news: it’s probably just as unpleasant – Achilles tendonitis, an inflamed tear in the tendon where it connects to the heelbone, a result of my senior moment on the stairs a week ago. My night was as bad as any I’ve ever had; unable to sleep or even walk because of the pain, I was reduced to crawling around and cursing. There was no pain reliever in the house, I had no way to get any in the middle of the night (the bicycle was a mile away, not that I could have ridden it), and I found to my dim surprise that nobody answers their cell phone at 3 am, because who calls you at 3 am unless they need something (booty calls notwithstanding but still applicable)? Finally, as the sun was rising, I spotted a neighbor through a window, working in his garden, which is what most Japanese people have instead of a front yard. During the long night I’d memorized three words: ashi (foot), itai (pain) and byoin (hospital), and I have a vague recollection of hopping/crawling out the door and into the street and screaming these words repeatedly at my neighbor, whom I’d never officially met. I make no apologies; I was pretty much hysterical with pain at that point. The happy result: a quick ride to Fukui Hospital, where I spent the rest of the morning dozing in a wheelchair, getting x-rayed, listening to a parade of medical types talk about me in Japanese, and thanking all the gods in heaven for whatever was in that little yellow pill they gave me and where can I get some more of those?

In the x-rays, it’s easy to see the angry black knot in my heel just next to the bone, sitting there like a spiteful little beast intent on ruining my month. After I’d spoken to the orthopedic surgeon – who, judging by the way the attending nurses all melted into nurse-colored goo when he glanced at them, is living a Grey’s Anatomy-style Doc McDreamy life in Fukui – I underwent an hour of brute torture in the hospital’s physical therapy room (what a depressing place; is this what old age looks like?). They then handed me a pair of crutches and two prescriptions and sent me packing. The total damage for five hours of uninsured medical care from Fukui’s finest? A whopping ¥11,344 – or about $96, not including the $12 prescriptions (that’s for both).

Is this a great country or what?