Having left Nagasaki (but not our hangovers) behind, we continued along the road to Fukuoka. Once again, we had no map, but luckily the signs were pretty clear and one hour into the trip, we were making decent time. However, we were also driving on small country roads that swerved sharply and caused my companions (I was driving….so those of you back home can imagine the terror experienced by the others) to frequently make little gasping noises or outright screams of terror. I just wanted to get there as fast as possible, and I was gonna be damned if any road curves were gonna stop me. However, partly in the interest of safety….but mostly to ease the minds of the others, we finally agreed to pay the toll fee (about $20) and get on the highway. Now we could cruise in style on a roomy, straight, two lane road at the mind blowing speed of 80 km/h. Yes folks. That seemed to be as fast as my little K-car would go. Other bigger white plate cars were tauntingly passing us by, and I was getting antsy from the fact that back home I usually drive about 140 km/h on the highways. Ah well. The ride was beautiful though, so soon I just accepted the fact that this was gonna take a while. An hour and a half later, we were still surprisingly making good time and were maybe another hour and a half away from Fukuoka when suddenly the car trouble started.
I should point out that the whole time the car had sounded a little iffy. I mean it’s not a big car and we had it loaded with four people and four bags so that it was pretty stuffed. Also, it made weird noises when I tried to push it past 80 km/h so I kept it under that. Now, however, I could smell something burning and I wasn’t getting all that much response from the gas pedal. I looked over at Kara and asked her if she smelled smoke and she nodded and then pointed at the hood. It looked like smoke was coming from the front. Shit, I thought. Not now! Not in Japan in the middle of nowhere with no one in the car speaking Japanese!!
I pulled the car over onto the shoulder and as soon as we came to a stop I could see that quite a lot of smoke was coming out of the front. Double shit! Kara and Nicole (who apparently know a fair bit about cars) pointed to the little gauge on the dash that shows engine temperature and it seemed to be indicating the car was seriously overheated. They both agreed we needed to wait for the car to cool down and then had to put water in to it. We had been waiting no more than 5 minutes when a road side assistance truck pulled up to us. Ah, the efficiency of the Japanese! We were in the middle of nowhere, had not called for help, and no cars had passed us for quite a while now, and here were these two emergency workers ready to help us out. They inspected the car and left us a huge thing of water and said to pour it in when it cooled (just as the girls had said) and said we should be fine. We thanked them and started the half an hour wait. Finally we poured the water in and were off again. Fifteen minutes later same thing started to happen again – I was now carefully watching the heating gauge and noticed it go into the red. We didn’t know what was happening. We had to do the same thing again (wait and pour water), drive 10 more minutes, and stop AGAIN. We did this like 10 times. Each time the car made it less further than before and the conclusion was that our water cooling pipe thing had a leak of some sort. Now we had no way of getting help and I couldn’t call the car rental company since I didn’t speak Japanese and we had all left the numbers of our supervisors back in Shimabara (yes, smart, smart). We kept about this for about 2 - 3 hours (!) before we made it to a smallish city and stopped at a gas station. We tried to explain the problem but they couldn’t help. The guy did hose down the whole engine with cold water though so that the car could make it a bit further. At this point it was about midnight and we were all tired as shit, starving, and sweaty, sticky and smelled pretty bad. We no longer cared about getting to Fukuoka but just wanted to find a hotel to shower and sleep in. But, bad news struck again. The gas station guys explained to us that there were no hotels nearby. It looked like we were in some industrial type area, and even though there were buildings everywhere, apparently the only hotels were love hotels. I conferred with the girls. We were all so irritated, gross and exhausted that we agreed even a love hotel was better than nothing, so we asked the now amused and somewhat embarrassed attendants for directions. The area we were in was highly confusing, and as we drove further and further we noticed that we were in a bigger city now. We realized we were completely lost and had still not found the hotel, while the car was quickly overheating again. Desperately looking for a hotel sign of any kind we finally saw, as if from the Heavens, ‘hotel’ was written in katakana along the side of one large building and right next to it was a large parking lot. Desperately, we dumped the car and dragged our asses into the hotel. As luck would have it, it was a business hotel (thankfully not a love hotel) and so was both very clean and reasonably priced. For the first time that day, we had some luck, as the reception was supposed to close at 12:30 am and we had arrived around 1 am to an attendant who just happened to be working late. She also spoke English. As she gave us our rooms keys the four of us almost burst into tears of relief. We also asked her for a map of the area to see where we were, and as it turns out, we had made it into downtown Fukuoka – just a few subway stops away from the city center! I actually did cry a little at that point and almost grabbed and kissed the receptionist (but was afraid she’d take away my room key and I wasn’t gonna risk that).
Wordlessly, the four of us stumbled upstairs and into our separate rooms and I could hear the other three doors slam followed by the sound of bodies thudding onto beds. After I had showered the grime from my body though, I heard a knock on my door and there was Nicole looking exhausted but determined. We had come all that way to party and while there was no way we could make it to a club that night, the least we could do was grab some beers and check out our surroundings. So we did just that. We lasted for only an hour though before going back to the hotel and passing out soundly.
The next morning our little group gathered over breakfast and we tried to figure out what to do. We had two more days to enjoy Fukuoka, and while we could have tried to deal with the car issue right away, we knew that it would have killed our good time. Therefore, we decided to just leave the car in the parking lot and worry about it in two days time.
Well, after that, Fukuoka was amazing. It‘s a big city, about the size of Toronto, and has pretty much everything a person wants. It’s also a lot more beautiful than Tokyo in my opinion, and much smaller so is more manageable. The first thing we went to do was shop, and we all stocked up on things not available in our smaller towns – like books and multimedia in English.
That night, we all got ready to go party in style. We put on our best party clothes and hopped onto the subway to go to find the Happy Cock -- a bar with lots of foreigners that came highly recommended (I just love the name). On the subway, we just happened to meet two U.S. Sailors stationed at Sasebo and we chatted them up. Well, as it turns out they knew a place to get some ‘shrooms in Fukuoka, and apparently it was legal! We were ecstatic! They were on their way there so we joined them and soon had purveyed some nice supplies. I wasn’t sure how potent it was gonna be, but since it was the only narcotic I was gonna have for a while, I figured what the hell. It would help kill some rainy afternoon. We said good bye to the sailors and although we couldn’t find the Happy Cock that night we did find another club called the DarkRoom, where the bartenders spoke English. Well the rest of the night was a bit of a blur, but we did meet this awesome Japanese chick who worked there and who started buying us shots because she felt bad that some asshole guys were in the club and bothering us. Soon we started buying her shots back, and happy and plastered we all danced the night away. From here the night gets even hazier, but as I recall, around 3 am Trisha and Kara decided to go back to the hotel. Nicole and I decided we wanted to keep partying, so we made our way to a Latin club nearby. I vaguely remember dancing with some Japanese girls and then being twirled wildly by Nicole in a very crowded and tiny dance space. As you can imagine, this did not turn out well. We were too drunk to keep our balance and Nicole was going crazy with the dancing. She lost her balance (on a poor J-girls foot) and fell backwards over piles of bodies. On her way down she grabbed my arm, and I, already off balance came crashing down beside her. I severely twisted my foot and toes in the process and it hurt so much that I nearly threw up from the pain, despite the pain numbing affects of all the alcohol in my blood stream. As people helped us up, I gathered the last remains of my self respect, dragged Nicole out of the club and into a cab and promptly passed out in a heap. I woke up the next morning and thought I had broken my toe. This ‘caused me to emit the biggest sigh of resignation that has ever been heard on this planet, I’m sure. Did the gods of travel not want me in Fukuoka? I limped downstairs.
We finally made contact with the car rental place, and decided that the best course of action was to leave the car in the parking lot so it could be towed, and then we made our way back to Shimabara with train, bus and ferry while Nicole got on the ferry to her Island. It was raining as we walked to the train station and we got totally soaked. There were also no free seats on the train, so we had to sit on the floor of the train like three wet, and tired bums. Incidentally, apart from the rain before we got onto the train, the way back was really easy, took only two hours and cost $30. Oh the trouble we could have saved ourselves had we only not taken the damn car.
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