Hitching Rides with Buddha Contributor(s): Ferguson, Will (Author) |
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ISBN: 1841957852 ISBN-13: 9781841957852 Publisher: Canongate Us OUR PRICE: $12.60 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2006 Annotation: Originally published as Hokkaido Highway Blues, with limited distribution in Canada, Will Ferguson's classic book about Japan, for all fans of the bestselling Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw. With the same fervour they have for outlandish game shows and tiny gadgets, the Japanese go nuts each spring when the cherry blossoms sweep from island to island towards the country's northerly tip. Will Ferguson was celebrating the event in the standard fashion. And after way too much sake he announced he would be the first person in recorded history to follow the blossom's progress end to end. To make it a challenge worth doing, he'd hitchhike all the way: relying on the kindness of some very weird and wonderful strangers. Mixing his penchant for biting observation with wicked humour, Ferguson starts at the southernmost tip of Cape Sata and heads north for distant Hokkaido. Whether he is doing the forbidden and not knowing it, or holding "conversations by non sequitur," it is a journey full of misadventures and revelations. The resulting travelogue is one of the funniest and most illuminating books ever written about Japan. "To make matters worse, I decided to hitchhike. Striking a heroic stance, I declared my intention to my Japanese friends to become the first person ever to hitchhike the length of Japan, end-to-end, cape-to-cape, sea-to-sea. This did not impress them as much as I had hoped. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Travel | Essays & Travelogues - Humor - Travel | Asia - Japan |
Dewey: 915.204 |
Physical Information: 0.95" H x 5.5" W x 8.25" (1.05 lbs) 432 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - Japanese |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Take a humorist from the Great White North -- one part Bob and Doug McKenzie, the other Bill Bryson -- feed him lots of sake, and set him loose hitchhiking his way through polite Japanese society. The result is one of the warmest and funniest travelogues you've read. It had never been done before. Not in four thousand years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. And, as Ferguson learns, it illustrates that to travel is better than to arrive. |