A: Yeah. Can you tell us the place, and where it is?
對。你能介紹一下這個地方的地理位置嗎?
B: Ogasawara is a group of islands that's in the Pacific Ocean. And there's no airport there and if you want to go there, you got to take a boat that goes from Tokyo. And that boat takes 25 hours to get there, and it runs just once a week.
A: Yeah. And Chichi-jima is Father Island and Haha-jima is Mother Island. And Father Island is a little bit bigger than Mother Island.
對。Chichi-jima是父島,而Haha-jima是母島。父島的面積比母島大一些。
B: Yes. And we lived in Chichi-jima.
對。我們在父島生活過。
A: And we lived in Chichi-jima. That's right. And what kind of—we had an amazing lifestyle there. Do you remember how we ended up there and what we were doing?
B: Well, our good friend Rio-san has a eco village in the mountain there. And he built the whole place on the side of a mountain with his bare hands basically, with wood and he built his home where he lives with his wife and two children. And he built loads of like cabins, as you might in Thailand or Philippines or somewhere like that, which is quite unusual in Japan. But he built these also with his own hand and he like connected them together with like wooden bridges. And yeah, that's where he lived and we really wanted to live so close to nature. So we saw Rio-san and found out that he had a little shack at a bit lower down from his house, and the girl that was living there was gonna move out. So we really wanted to move in there. So we asked him and we ended up living there.
A: Yeah. I remember the day we went to see that little shack. And it was extremely small, four-by-three. I would say, 4 meters by 3 meters.
對。我還記得我們?nèi)タ磁镂莸哪翘?。那里非常小,面積是4米乘3米。
B: 4 centimeters by 3 centimeters.
4厘米乘3厘米。
A: It was really small.
那個棚屋非常小。
B: That's how small it seemed.
我剛才的意思是看上去就像那么小。
A: And it was hanging on the side of the hill. Yeah, it was raised on a scaffolding, and because it's a very wet place, so it gets really humid and you don't want any contact with the building and the land. So we were hanging on the side of the hill.
B: And there's the ants. Do you remember the ants? They had to build it on the scaffolding because there was white ants. They called them termites, that can eat the wood.
那里有螞蟻。你還記得那些螞蟻嗎?要建在棚架上是因為那里有白螞蟻。那些螞蟻的學名是白蟻,它們吃木頭。
A: That's right.
沒錯。
B: Do you remember seeing those ants?
你記得看到那些螞蟻時的情景嗎?
A: I remember that. I remember how scared we were when the hurricane — the typhoons would come and the whole shack would shake. And we'd be like praying so that we wouldn't slide to the side of the hill.
A: Yeah, we had four chickens. What about our toilet, do you remember?
記得,我們養(yǎng)了四只雞。那你記得我們的廁所嗎?
B: I remember our toilet. Digging the toilet. I remember digging the toilet and making the compost and moving the toilet every now and then. I remember growing all the vegetables. I remember collecting the eggs.
A: Yeah. One of the hardest things was the showers. We had this solar panel-run showers, and when it was cloudy, in the middle of the winter, I would suffer. It was so hard to take cold showers.
B: Yeah. It wasn't like very cold was it really compared to mainland Japan but it really, really did feel cold with the wind there. Like you say, when the cloud came across because there was no hot water—yeah, it was tough. But did you remember next to the showers, every two weeks or so in the winter, Rio-san would light up the—make a fire, like wood-burning fire which heated up the outdoor pool?
B: And there's no hot springs on the island but we got to sit in the pool, under the stars in the evening.
島上沒有溫泉,不過晚上的時候,我們會坐在泳池里看星星。
A: Yeah. There were so many great experiences and to realize also that nature is so powerful. And if you want to live with it, you have to coexist and you have to be very strong to live in a place like that.
B: Exactly. There had to be a strong community in the mountain. There's only 400 people in the mountain, wasn't there? Two thousand total. It was like a separate village from the other village.