I want to write this journal tonight before I forget the wonderful details that composed this past trip. I am about to embark on another extended journey and I don’t want to lose such a great experience as I have a tendency to muddle events together.

Ben and I started off early in the morning to what would prove to be a very stressful train ride to the Izu peninsula of Japan. We had a Wednesday vacation and we took advantage of the gorgeous weather by taking Thursday and Friday off to have a 5 day vacation. We had traveled with our bikes before in trains but this was our first time doing so with 50 pounds each of extra gear. A bike can get heavy very quick carrying it around a train station, but we arrived at in the northern part of the peninsula in a quick three and half hours in a town called Izunokuni. We were expecting rain all day and were greeted by a wonderful bright sun. We loaded up the bikes and I was riding a real touring bike for the first time in my life. I was surprised at how comfortable a loaded, heavy bike can be.

Our first day of riding basically followed the western coast along the only highway there was. The road was well paved and quiet and we made it that day to a town called Heda. We were both surprised at how little we had rode that day looking at the map that night of the whole rest of the peninsula that we wanted to cover in the next days. We stopped in Heda because it had an onsen (natural hot spring public bath) and because we were told that we could sleep on the beach. Onsens make all the pain and filthiness of sweating and sitting on a saddle for 12 hours just melt away. After we were all clean it started to rain which I was actually looking forward to in a way. I had designed and built a pannier for my bike which I had fabricated out of a 5$ recycle shop bag and a 1 $ wire self. It looked great but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be waterproof or not. It wasn’t. But no worries because I had stuffed everything in plastic bags (which abound in this country) and I had equipped myself with my 1$ rain pains, front basket cover and I already had the rain coat which had accompanied me on my Camino de Santiago. We were told by the women in the convenience store that everything was closed for the night and that the road was too dangerous to keep going for the night. Ben had gotten some funny looks from the men at the onsen when he told them that we were going to be camping on the beach that night so we were trying to keep that detail under wraps from everyone in the town. We decided to investigate the town for ourselves and found one shop open who’s owner had been standing outside waving us in a couple of hours before hand. Good advertising. We had our first wonderful meal of the tour and it felt great to eat after a long day of riding. Fresh sashimi and tempura. We biked to the beach afterwards and set up camp in the rain only to have it stop raining ten minutes after struggling to get everything up and dry. We both slept really bad because of the wind and were a bit grumpy getting up in the morning.

The grumpiness ended after discovering that on the other side of the cape were we had slept we had an absolutely perfect view of Mt. Fuji. We had both never gotten a real clear view of it before and it was truly awesome to see fully uncovered and shining in the sunlight. Mt. Fuji is known for being very elusive and is normally covered in clouds so it was quite the gift to be able to see it as a whole. It’s incredible how big it is, and how it just rises out of nothing with no other mountains around at all. It was a great way to start the day and we both almost fell off our bikes a couple of times during the day from starring at it from the road.

Day two’s biking also followed the coast with beautiful views of Fuji and the sea. Lots of ups and down made us feel like we were really on an adventure. I kept asking Ben if we were really bike tourist or not. I think we were in a five dollar pannier sort of way. That night we were searching for an onsen and a place to put our tent when we were told by a hotel owner that it would only be 25$ to stay for the night in the hotel with all night access to the onsen and we could wear Yokatas (light traditional Japanese robes). I am incredibly cheap and was a bit hesitant to accept but a cost benefit analysis made it clear that this was a great deal. We knew that we were close to a temple that we could see on top of a hill just above our hotel so we raced up there before showering to see the sunset. It turned out to be a very famous rock that was just over the hill that sits in the ocean with a cutout at the base in which the sun sets perfectly. There was only an older couple on the stone beach with us and it was quite mesmerizing watching the sunset there. We climbed back up and made some miso soup in our room with our little camp stove (probably illegal) and hit the outdoor onsen and walked around in our beautiful Yokatas. We ended the night sleeping on futons atop a tatami floor and debating how to put the traditional Japanese bed together which was a first for me. Sleep.

Day three took us inland and away from the coast. The coast had been beautiful and treated us very nicely but the interior of Izu is truly breathtaking in its beauty. We climbed and climbed up a mountain and then coasted into this beautiful valley where rape blossom was blooming everywhere giving us a yellow flower patch that stretched as far as we could see. We were flying through this valley when Ben yelled out that he smelled bread. We were both perpetually hungry during this trip and hadn’t eaten for an hour (only), so were already starting to feel hunger pains. We were clearly in the country side and nowhere jumped out to us as being a bakery so we asked the first man we saw who for the first minute told us that there were no bakeries nearby but then a upon second thought remembered that his neighbor baked bread to sell at a market in town and that we should go and see if they would sell us any. Lo and behold the baker was outside pulling out a fresh batch of bread when we pulled up on our bikes and she just happened to speak perfect English. Eventually we met the whole baking family which consisted of a husband and wife in their mid thirties who had moved to the country from Tokyo and their two children. We got a tour of their wheat field and I was very excited to talk bread a bit with them. They only make sourdough bread and mix half their own local grown grain and half grain grown in Hokkaido. They were a very interesting pair and we talked about the grateful dead, WWOOF, sour dough starter and shared a cup of tea before we headed out on the road, set with banana chocolate, walnut fig and cranberry almond bread in our panniers.

Upon the couple’s recommendation we changed our path a bit to go to a farmers market and one of the cooler café’s I have been to in my life called Spice dog. The farmers market featured locally grown vegetables and fruits and we picked up some great finds including local grown oranges and a smoked fish. Outside the shop there was a free foot onsen with incredibly hot water which we soaked in for a bit before being joined by a middle age Japanese man named Arizono (like the state only with an “O” I was told) who took out a smiley face Ukulele and took us quite by surprise with the beautiful melodic music that he was able to produce with it.

We knew we had to hurry up a bit if we were going to get to the waterfalls in the interior which we planned on going to but again we got detoured by a wonderful town in the South called Shimoda. Especially noteworthy about the town was a little road called Perry road which was lined with what looked to me like European inspired old stone buildings now filled with hip bars and cafes. Another great surprise was a handmade screen printed postcard shop with fantastic artwork. Afterwards we really had to hurry up and made it to Kamoza where we wanted to stay. Before we found the hostel we eventually decided to stay at for the night we met a huge Japanese man who told us he had won 1000$ in Las Vegas which his wife spent on shoes which was interesting to hear. The hostel looked more like a modern art museum than a youth hostel and I was convinced that it couldn’t be what we were looking for. We were planning on camping but the price was right and it offered us another opportunity to take a bath and soak our aching bodies so we decided to fork over the bit extra to sleep somewhere other than a tent. It turned out to be a great decision and we had access to one of the more beautiful and fashionable onsens that I have seen and also a “hot stone sauna” which consisted of a fairly large, darkly lit sauna room filled with new age music with a floor of small pebbles upon which to lay. We only had one roommate, an older gentleman who only snored once during the night, so we were very happy with our nights rest. Another dip in the onsen in the morning and we were off exploring waterfalls.

After an hour or two walking around a bit too touristy waterfall collection, and buying some souvenirs for teachers and friends we were off on what would be our hardest day of biking yet. The ride started out with a spectacularly scary two loop bridge with almost no side path for bikes followed by an hour straight of climbing up one hill after another. The highlight was finding a small gravel detour road which we had all to ourselves on which we stopped and ate our smoked fish by a waterfall. That was one of the better moments of the tour. Afterwards, we got to ride though a very old, now mostly unused stone tunnel and climbed more mountains until we came upon a wasabi farm. It was really interesting and I had never seen something of that scale before. Wasabi looks like a green carrot and is ground up to make the spicy stuff served alongside, or on sushi. Here, they were growing it in only water and had filled an entire river with the plant for at least half a mile. It was truly impressive the terracing that they had accomplished and I cannot imagine the number of people it must take to harvest and plant such a huge operation. We went off on the last leg of our tour which was uphill for hours on end before finally coasting into the train station where we had 20 minutes to disassemble our bikes and board. My bike is a bit more convenient to take apart because it is smaller so I sprinted to the 7/11 and bought 3 onigiri (rice balls), 2 snickers, 1 bag of sembe (rice crackers), 1 sandwich and a pack of 3 sushi. It was a most rewarding meal inside the train that night as we were returned home after a gratifying adventure and break from our normal Japan lives.

-James