In an age when most travelers do not move an inch without Google Maps, Google Translate and apps for booking trains and hotels, two Israeli travel bloggers, Ariel Ron and Ben Gordon, decided to do exactly the opposite. The two flew to Japan, a country they had not researched in advance at all, and managed without smartphones, navigation or apps.
In an interview with ynet, they described how they relied on strangers in the street, why they chose a country where English is not widely spoken and how they found themselves taking part in the filming of a music video by local rappers and sitting down to dinner with a Japanese couple who even downloaded Hebrew to their keyboard especially to communicate with them.
The idea, the two said, was born out of previous challenges they had done together.
“We’ve done a lot of challenges in the past and really wanted to do some kind of challenge,” Ron told ynet. “We did a competition in Israel to see who could cross the country first by hitchhiking, and because of that we wanted to do some kind of competition challenge abroad. One day Ben called me and said, ‘If you drop me in the middle of nowhere, I’ll manage.’ I told him, ‘Let’s go, let’s test it. Let’s see if you really can.’”
He said the choice of Japan was not accidental.
“We thought of a country that could be interesting, that neither of us knew,” he said. “The idea was that we also weren’t allowed to research anything about it beforehand. Before we landed in Japan, we didn’t know anything about Japan. The idea was to arrive and then start figuring out how to manage, how to talk to locals, how to take public transportation, how to find a place to sleep and how to find a place to eat.”
So how do you really manage without navigation, without apps and without the ability to book tickets online? Gordon said the answer is simple: people.
“We had to depend on other people,” he said. “There are signs that often help, but usually it was simply a matter of asking people — at information centers or just on the street.”
To his surprise, almost no one was puzzled by the request.
“During the whole competition, maybe two people asked me, ‘Don’t you have Google Maps?’ All the rest simply immediately offered to help me, and even led me to where I needed to go.”
Gordon was especially impressed by the way he was treated in Japan.
“One time, someone walked me 15 minutes,” he said. “I was really surprised. The Japanese are incredibly nice and were simply happy to help.”
One of the biggest challenges was, of course, the language. Unlike destinations where it is possible to get by in English, in Japan the two had to manage without translation apps as well.
“That was one of the reasons we chose Japan, because we also wanted a country that doesn’t speak English so it would be more challenging,” Ron explained.
Still, he said, the reality was less intimidating than he had expected.
“Before I came to Japan, I didn’t know anything about it. It sounds like the most complicated place in the world, but the truth is that once you understand how things work there, they are really orderly,” he said, referring, among other things, to the country’s train system. “It was a surprise to discover that.”
Beyond the challenge itself, the two said the experiment proved to them that it is possible to manage even without the technology most of us rely on every day.
“First of all, it proved to us that it’s possible,” Gordon said. “At first, I wasn’t sure it was physically possible to do something like this, especially in Japan, which is a very modern country and very dependent on phones.”
He said one of the most important lessons from the trip was knowing that even if your phone disappears, all is not lost.
“Now I know that if I really get stuck somewhere, say my phone is stolen, lost or stops working, I’ll manage.”
Asked whether he could have received similar treatment in Israel, Ron did not hesitate.
“Of course. What do you mean? Israelis are the best in the world.”
Asked about the unexpected experiences that happened precisely because they did not have phones, the two described encounters that likely would not have happened otherwise.
Gordon recalled a day when he was waiting for a bus that never arrived.
“I started talking with a group of local people, and in the end, somehow, I joined them,” he said. “They were young rappers filming a music video for their song, and I ended up joining the shoot. It was a really cool experience that I never dreamed would happen to me.”
Ron described another encounter, with a Japanese couple he met by chance in a town he had reached.
“Because I was without a phone, I started talking to them,” he said. “I rode with them on a bus to the town I needed to get to, and then they invited me to dinner.”
He said the man, whose name was Tokyo, even downloaded Hebrew to his keyboard so he could communicate with him better.
“He explained a lot of things to me, and that was the whole reason there was any communication at all.”