BEE Japan

Hello everyone!
I feel like it has been ages since I last wrote a blog post. In fact it has been ages but the time just flies by on his so it seems like just yesterday that we waved goodbye to Wakkanai and headed south on our journey.

So far we have travelled about 1400km, we`ve been on the road for 25 days, we`ve had 16 nights of camping, 5 nights of homestays, one night in a rider house, one in a guesthouse ( bless FuFu in Niigata), one night on a farm (thanks to our wonderful sponsors at WWOOF) and one restless night on a ferry from Hokkaido to Aomori.

We had rain, thunder and lightning, sun, fog, clouds, smiles (but no tears! - that I`ve seen). We`ve had numerous broken spokes and a fair few punctures, a few falls and we`ve so far lost a jacket, some tent pegs and a few other bits and bobs.

Those are the salient points so far and as I type this from the 2nd floor of the Alishan organic food store my mind seems incapable of writing anything more imaginative. Let me explain.

When I started planning BEE 2008 I had fanciful notions of blogging updates on a daily basis. I even got a fantastic tech sponsor to give us a small laptop for the purpose but the reality of the ride is that there is always something to do. We arrived nice and early yesterday at 1pm a Alishan having survived a night of flooding in Kasukabe (luckily we were at a homestay). But then 3 of us had to go into the center of Tokyo to do a presentation and because of foul weather we and cancelled trains we didn`t get back to Alishan until 1am. The presentation was at People Tree, a fair trade company and the feedback was great. We are meeting so many wonderful organizations and people on the tour and I so desperately want to tell everyone out there about them but the BEE Ride just seems to sap our time away.

What I can tell you for now is that everyone is doing great. We are all healthy and everyone is happy with the riding. We had our second 100km day a few days ago and we crossed the Japanese Alps in just 3 days climbing up to 1000m above sea level. I am amazed every day by the kindness and generosity of the people we meet and by the BEE team members. We are fast becoming quite the little family!

So while the blogging may be slow going we do keep an eye on the comments so please keep your messages of support coming in.

At least one member managed to take some time off today for some writing so please take a look at Cat`s post on food. We eat very well on our vegetarian diet mostly due to the wonderfully talented Cat and Emi who are seasoned veggie experts. You can also enjoy a post about day 4 of the ride; better late than never.

Well tomorrow is another ride day and we are heading just 50km in towards Tokyo where we will have the afternoon for sightseeing then we`ll have an event at Heaven`s Door in the evening. If you are in Tokyo please come along.

CJ