There's nothing duller than Kyushu in early April. Those words entered my head as I hauled myself aboard a bus leaving the Japanese city of Kumamoto in April, 1992. At that time, I'd been traveling around Kyushu, Japan's large southern island, for about a week. Several days of overcast skies and rain had dampened my enthusiasm for this trip. But the bus ride I was about to take would change that, and give me a new appreciation for the power of nature.

During my stay in Japan, I normally took trains wherever I went. But there were no trains heading in my direction. So, I had to make this leg of the trip by bus. I chose that particular bus because its route passed Mount Aso, an active volcano that was said to have had the most explosive eruptions of any volcano on Earth. Seeing that my hometown of Toronto doesn't have any of them, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get close to a live volcano. Especially one, as it turned out, that was ready to blow.

The Lay of the Land

As the bus pulled out of the city, I couldn't help but notice that the ride was a lot like the one from Toronto to Montreal. The highway was peppered with beautiful roadcuts where mountain and hill were blasted and chopped away to create this thoroughfare. I looked up and down at the laddering bits of rock that jutted out just a few meters away from the bus. I wondered if the temptation to try to climb the roadcut had gotten the better of any of the locals.

Whenever the roadcuts ended, there were impressive stands of trees broken up by wide, deep fields. This struck me as odd, seeing how modern Japan is, in many ways, at war with nature. In his book Lost Japan, long-time resident Alex Kerr wrote: "It is said that of Japan's thirty thousand rivers and streams, only three remain undammed, and even these have had their streambeds and banks encased in concrete." Trees and forest have fared as badly, with centuries-old growth leveled in the name of modernization. But if someone tells you that Japan doesn't have any large tracts of trees, that person is either lying or doesn't know what they're talking about. While not as impressive as the forests of Ontario, British Columbia, or the Pacific Northwest, there's something almost otherworldly about a stand of trees in Japan.

For a little while at least, the shifting of the scene from rock to trees to field occupied my eyes and brain. There was something almost exciting about not knowing what would next be coming into view. But quickly, the familiar morphed into the prosaic. My eyes moved from the window and my mind started to drift to more immediate concerns. Like where I'd be staying for the next couple of nights; what I'd be doing at my destination, the city of Beppu; and, most important, of what I was going to eat for dinner that night.