BEE Japan

After a night of revels with the irrepressible Mo-chan we awoke to a breakfast of homemade granola lovingly prepared by Cat (I’m always in awe of her ability to get up and make food appear out of midair).  Over breakfast we chatted and hummed and hawed and packed and repacked, none of us wanting to leave the comfort of the Wish Club, none of us wanting to ride what would be our toughest day yet.

After final photos and our Polaroid being placed on Mo-chan‘s big map along with push pins to indicate each of our home towns, we were waved off into the Saturday morning traffic that would envelope us for the next 2 hours. We rode along the busy streets of Shimizu and then the prefectural capital of Shizuoka, avoiding lorries, cars and trucks with the impromptu bouts of singing which kept keeping the largest vehicles away through either some karmic repulsion or else fear of a slightly over-caffeinated group of identical-looking foreigners on bikes.

We reached a main arterial route and rode along the overgrown pavement towards a big tunnel. Cat and I took off ahead but had to stop at the sign warning us that bicycles were not permitted to ride in the tunnel. Emi and Fan had stopped short of the tunnel and we headed back to discover Emi had fallen off her bike. After some group medical attention with 3 riders acting as doctor and 3 medical kits providing an almost comic array of bandages, ointments and disinfectants, we turned our back on the main road and headed for the coast, just 1 km away but worlds apart.

Even for a Saturday morning there was little traffic along the jagged coastline, most of the cars preferring to take the main road that drilled through the hills; the destination is more important than the journey, speed and efficiency overriding the view from the window.

We headed south and the road hugged the contours of the coast for as long as it could and where it couldn’t the ingenuity and imagination of the Japanese took over; the road simply left the hill and took off over the sea, curving out through the blue waters on concrete stilts until it once again felt confident enough to join the hills, rising up to the cliff tops in a series of tight turns that took our every effort and gear to tackle in the increasing heat.

At one point we were overtaken by an older man on a road bike whose speed and energy put us to shame, especially when we noticed that one of his legs was artificial from the knee down. The fraternity of people on 2 wheels has been incredible and it shone through to us again when we reached the top of hill to be welcomed with hi-fives and shouts of “good luck” from the same man.

We rode on through the heat. We thought ourselves lucky when we turned away from the busy roads and headed into the tea plantations but instead we were faced with a different challenge — more hills.

I love riding in Japan. The variety of the landscape is incredible and each prefecture we have visited has offered very different styles of buildings and towns (none of which you would see on the national highways so get on your bike!). However, don’t let anyone fool you into thinking Japan is flat. It is not.

We climbed and climbed and climbed. With every muscle of my body straining against the slope, each crank of the pedals triggering another outpouring of sweat I thought that I might pass out from the effort. Bizarrely the burn in my legs wasn’t the most annoying aspect of this task; it was the salt running down into my eyes from the sweat. And so a tragic-comic routine started where I would crank a few times, then have to ride with one hand while the other wiped the sweat out of my eyes before the weight of my bike and the one-armed steering caused me to crash into the rows of neatly trimmed tea bushes.

As the slope flattened out we were treated to 360 degrees of tea. Shizuoka Prefecture is probably the most famous tea-growing region in Japan and for the next 4 hours we rode through fields of the stuff; row upon row of waist-high deep green bushes, cut 3 feet wide, all exactly the same marching away down the hill, dipping off out of view only to emerge again on another hill in the distance.

This continued in much the same manner until we reached the north of Hamamatsu city. There aren’t really any exciting encounter stories to tell, such was the heat and distance we had to travel. Some days you just have to put your head down and rely upon some homemade onigiri (thank you Mo-chan), lots of water (I drank about 10 litres), occasional bouts of madness (I sometimes pretend I`m conducting an orchestra as I cycle) and of course, the continued presence of your riding partner who you know is feeling every hill and contour as much as you are.

As the sun ducked out of view we feasted on prepared foods from the supermarket and some quinoa made on the stove, our quota of plastic packaging taking a big hit, our sense of environmentalism being overridden by sheer hunger.

The day ended with some stealth camping in a local park with some of us foregoing tents and sleeping on top of the kids’ play structure. I positioned my sleeping bag at the entrance to the slide and managed to stay there until morning although the thought of waking up at the bottom of the slide in my sleeping bag did amuse me for a while before tiredness took over and I fell into a deep sleep.

 Route info

Distance travelled today: 112km