Bike Touring! Approach and Day 1: Hakodate to Yakumo

Finally a chance to update after five days of touring! I'll split them into individual ride posts for ease of reference though.

After Hiroshima we returned to Tokyo, spent the night via AirBnB with a math student studying English / French, grabbed the bikes and headed north. To take the bikes on the train we have to Ringko - but them in a bag then carry them through the station. The bagging itself is straight forward, but carrying bike, panniers etc through Tokyo station was a work out.

Our train up was a Shinkensen up to Aomori where we changed to a local train for the tunnel to Hokkaido. The tunnel is 50km long! We disembarked in Hakodate, a city a 200 000. The night was spent stealth camping by a local shrine. Dinner was a seafood restaurant. Brendan indulged while I ate rice, tofu, and salad.

*stealth camping = camp in a discreet corner of a park. Would generally be frowned upon but accepted or at least not banned here

Day 1 biking faced a choice: take the direct route north, or the quieter but longer route. We opted for the shorter route to enjoy our time in the touristy areas to the north.

The ride was main road most of the way. The traffic was tedious but it was a gorgeous day and gorgeous views! One major climb which wasn't too bad. Brendan had a flat at the bottom of this climb. While we were changing it a passing motorist stopped and helped us, including the use of his full size pump! The first of many friendly acts from the locals and I'm starting to realize this is typical of the people here.

We ended our day in a town called Yakomo, stealth camping in a park. We had dinner at what is apparently a Japanese chain - they had an allergy menu! After we rushed to the santo, or public bath. A santo is a bath house with the male / female sides split by a wall. You take your clothes off, wash at the shower, and then relax in the bath / hot tub. It was fantastically relaxing! And reminded me quite a bit of my Turkish Barh experience in Istanbul. Incidentally: santos are public baths which historically were the bathing place. They are dying out now, but there are still people who don't have a shower in their house who rely on the santos. Cost is ~$4.

Trip numbers:

83km today

83 km total per MapMyRide

Note km numbers: MapMyRide drains the phone battery quite a bit so I only use it for the main segments each day. Most of these are written retrospectively so I don't have the odometer reading. Total km will be much higher. But to be written yet

Our route. Map My Ride screen shots aren't great for maps, I'll replace these with proper ones later. Note the calorie values though! I'm having trouble eating enough...

Elevation profile

Bike at the entrance to our stealth camp

Hard to see but this shows ads aimed at mothers for mama charis at this bike shop

Self cleaning reflector in the tunnel. Genius! And our first of many, many tunnels

Skiing anyone? Hokkaido gets losts of snow in the winter. Lonely Planet makes the case that with cheap lift tickets here, a Japan ski trip may be cheaper than a Rockies one... Incidentally this is also the hill Brendan had a flat on.

Mountain we circled around. Not sure if it's still an active volcano

Action shot!

Random rural station, and the cute single car train running on the route.

Whiskey anyone? Yes that's a 4L bottle...

Allergy menu!

Massive amounts of food =D

Our santo proprietor

Hiroshima preview

After Kyoto we went down to Hiroshima. Today Hiroshima is a bustling city of over 1 million people. It was hard to believe the city was completely destroyed on August 6, 1945. The A bomb memorial park was quite somber. I'll write more about that when I can upload photos....

Accommodations in Hiroshima were a hostel but it was a chain and not nearly as homey as Pan and Circus. It was also far more aimed at international travellers.

Dinner in Hiroshima was, as all dinners in Japan are, an adventure. We started by walking randomly in the general direction of the memorial. Not sure where to look for food, we were like a moth to a flame as we followed the bright lights. Eventually we tried two Japanese restaurants but couldn't communicate at all with then in order for me to safely eat. On a whim Brendan decided to try a French one. Communication was much improved but regrettably the prices were too high. We were about to leave when we were stopped, and one of the patrons then led us out and a few blocks over to a different French restaurant and was greet enthusiastically by the patrons and staff there. Clearly our guide was well known. He then left and we ordered our food in French while the chef prepared custom meals in front of us!

Kyoto

June is rainy season in most of Japan. To beat it we used our Japan Rail Pass to head down for a whirlwind 4 day tour of Kyoto and Hiroshima.

Kyoto

Kyoto is a lovely city that until the 1860s was the capital of Japan. There are countless temples and shrines throughout the city and the city is nestled in a valley. The shrines get increasingly gorgeous the higher up the hills you go. Unfortunately there isn't a hop on hop off tour bus for the highlights - it would be an ideal city for it as the top sites are kilometres apart. We walked the first day and negotiated the public transit the second.

Kyoto is also a very touristy place and we found more English there than in Tokyo. Most restaurants and shops had at least some English. The local specialty is a Japanese beef (wagyu). Kobe beef is actually the most famous type of this, but we weren't in Kobe so we had the Tokyo variety instead!

Finding a restaurant was difficult due to the paradox of choice. there was a lovely narrow street that ran beside the river and had countless restaurants and shops. They were also super high end with entrees in excess of $100 a plate common. Fortunately there was cheaper fare to be had and we found a restaurant offering different parts of beef a la carte, which you cooked at your table. We tried Kyoto prime rib (tatekanoko), then added salted beef tongue (tantsura), beef heart (hatsu), artery (korikori), and trachea (urute). Tatekanoko and tantsura were fantastic, hatsu was quite good, korikori is an acquired taste and urute.... Well, it's crunchy and was not finished, we'll leave it at that.

Our accommodation in Kyoto deserves special mention. I've been booking on the fly, often the day before, utilizing expedia, hostel world, airbnb, etc. The only affordable option I could find for Kyoto last minute was a hostel called Pan and Circus. Believe it or not, I've never done the dorm style hostel before, having usually camped or stayed at B&Bs in Europe. I had some trepidation about what the experience would be like. I needn't have worried though as Pan and Circus was super friendly and some fantastic memories were formed made.

Our first night we met an Israeli illustrated who in his off season was travelling and was now on his 7th month, having previously been in India and Sri Lanka surfing. We joined up the next day for the Philosopher's Walk past the temples / shrines.

After an exhausting day after which we headed back to the hostel ~5pm to rejuvenate before finding a restaurant for dinner.  We were sitting in the common area resting while others arrived. Our hostess Marian (sp?) made a special effort to introduce everyone as new people arrived. Soon Japanese ladies with minimal English tried to engage us in conversation. So began a delightful evening of conversation with the help of phrase books and apps. Talking of going for dinner together arose and I showed my handy allergy card to alert them to the challenges. At this two of the women offered to make food for us! We had a fantastic dinner of Japanese curry, and continued talking in the Pan and Circus bar until midnight.

The following day was a whirlwind tour through a bamboo grove and the Golden Pavilion before heading to Hiroshima late that afternoon.

Street of expensive restaurants

Our raw food

Our grill

A wonderful temple complex. We watched a ceremony from the deck in the main building seen above.

Temple, I think this one was of the dead... There wasn't a lot of information available on them.

A Japanese graveyard. No family tree research to do here, so no need for a grave rubbing.

This entire drink with ice came from a vending machine...

Crane

Our friends at Pan and Circus  :)

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!

Tokyo

We've been a week so far in Japan. At first I was anxious, especially with regards to eating. I'm having a great time now though! And eating, though not particularly well.

At arrival in Japan we were approached by a Japanese television crew and did an interview on why we had chosen to come to Japan. Apparently I'm on Japanese TV.... Somewhere. After that errands and the airport (SIM card, yen, rail pass exchange) and into Tokyo. Brendan's father has a friend Sam in the Shinjuku area who is lending us bikes and so we targeted staying in that neighbourhood.

Tokyo is.... Massive. We walked into Shinjuku station our first morning and encountered wave after wave of people heading to work. Seemed far busier than union station.... And it's one of several major stations within the Tokyo area. Shibuya crossing is massive with thousands of people crossing through the scramble crossing every iteration. Shibuya is also filled with amazing stores and neon lights, while Shinjuku is known for its night life. And that's all we've seen so far in Tokyo so far! We also did a "Shake down" ride on the bikes to figure out the kinks.

Tokyo highlights:

- Our restaurant hosts the first night we're three men around my age who were super enthusiastic about trying to feed me within allergy restrictions. We wanted to go back but it never quite fit.

- second dinner was in Shibuya. The staff there did a coordinated shouted greeting and farewell to every patron. They also apparently have a Toronto location called Teppen. Anyone been?

Leaving Tokyo

 We have the 21 day rail pass (the maximum), so are trying to fit our of Tokyo experiences into this time. At the suggestion of Sam we opted to head west to Kyoto early on before the rainy season started. Hokkaido is actually dry during June so we'll be fine biking later.

Enough for now! So much to say it will become far too long for one post... More to come!

 Our interview :)

Shinjuku rush hour

Shibuya crossing. We watched for a while from Starbucks and every crossing was like this

Sake barrels at Meiji Jingu, a garden / temple in Tokyo to commemorate emperor Meiji who oversaw the modernization of Japan.

My meal at Teppen in Shibuya