Colin R Johnston

I've just moved back from Japan after 3 years and it goes without say that returning to the UK is a culture shock. A phenomenon usually associated with travelling abroad I've found that it is even more acute when you return home.

I think it has something to do with travel being such a euphoric experience. The sensory overload of seeing new things, places and people is mingled with the sheer excitement of their "newness" and so the shock factor is lost in a wondrous miasma of sight, sounds and smell. When you come home there isn't quite that same wonder. Its just slightly different to how you left it and you have to relearn how tedious it all really is.

So the trick to combating this torpor is to try to find the fun in the mundane and the stupefying in the everyday.

To blow away some of the cobwebs of the past few weeks I headed out on my bike for a nice long ride around the Ayrshire countryside. My bike croaked into action after a long rest in the garage. (It and I have just finished riding across Japan and it was perhaps hoping for a continuation of long road days when I got back to Scotland. www.beejapan.org for more.)

Its not the best time of year to be coming home and I was wise to order up some winter cycling clothing over the web (I recommend www.wiggle.com by the way). Leaving Alloway and heading south along the coast to Maidens and Culzean Castle was tricky with the good old south westerlies initially playing havoc with my rhythm and cadence. But as I cranked out the miles the muscles took over, remembering lenghty days in Japan over the summer and my mind was free to wander out along the road and into the hills to discover afresh the places and associated memories of a part of the world that I am forever connected with.

When I got home after a good 33 miles (50 km just to retain the metric I grew to love in Japan. Bigger numbers seems far more impressive!) I scrolled through the camera to look at my ride snapshots. A ruined building here, an abbey, old houses, harvested fields weathered by the late autumn winds. Nothing exciting and yet I thought back to similar pictures I had taken in Japan. Ones of golden rice ripening in September, old houses, temples and orchards, shrines and forests. The stock shots of Japan, which had seemed so glorious because of their rich colours and exotic qualities at the time, now, after 3 years, seem so familiar.

So could I see anything of the exotic in the shots I had just taken of my back yard? Maybe not exotic but breathing in the landscape and elements and reliving it though my photos did make me stir. And I felt the same ripple of energy that you get when you engage or reengage with your environment.