Bikes and Shakedown ride

Our host Sam graciously has lent us two bikes for our trip. At his suggestion we took them out for a ride in Tokyo.

Bikes:

Sam's bike is a steel frame, heavy duty bike with a climbing gear, iphone mount and dynamo. Since I'm carrying more weight (trucking freeze dried food / cliff bars to help me eat in the land of seafood!), I'll be on this one. Brendan is on a bike with a carbon fork, handlebars, and seat. Its a nice bike that flies when unloaded. It lacks a climbing gear though and the carbon front end emphasizes the heaving weight from the panniers at the rear.

Ride:

Thanks the the battery pack / dynamo we were able to do turn by turn directions from the iphone. It was nice to not have to constantly stop and check where we were. We rode 15km through city streets until the one river, continued along the river a ways, and then retraced our steps. Approximately 40km total and we did it fully loaded. It was a great chance to test our equipment and figure out what didn't work. We'll definitely had too much and will be leaving the extra in Tokyo.

Me

Brendan's bike. I don't seem to have one of him with it....

Side note speaking of bikes - they are very common here but fall into two classes. mama chari, or mother's chariot, is the common one. They range from the bikes on the left and right of the picture, all the way up to the massive bike in the middle with two child seats and electric assist. We've seen a mother with 3 kids on one of these! The nice part for the users is the simplicity - a simple lock through the rear wheel suffices for locking. the second bicycle type is of course the "real" bicycles like what we're riding, but these are fairly uncommon here. Apparently there's a large cultural difference between the two though!