02 Japan

​JAPAN

March 22nd Abu Dhabi airport.

As I write, a silent TV screen overhead flashes up CNN News images on a never ending soundless loop. Two bombs have gone off in Brussels killing about twenty five people. Islamic fundamentalists, whatever that means. More like mentalists.
Right now, a contingent of some twenty women flock to the seating area I am in all dressed identically in black head to toe dresses and vivid pink head scarves, all stamped with ‘All Medina Hajj Services’. Ladies all the way from Orissa in southern India, heading for Mecca, amongst the thronging thousands it’s going to be handy to be able to identify your mates easily.

A couple of hours ago, about forty middle aged men all dressed completely in white sheets piled into another waiting lounge, presumably all following a similar tactic. The mass repetition of vivid dress is visually mesmerising. I can only wonder what Hajj at Mecca must look like, with its thousands of pilgrims swirling slowly round the central black stone in their distinctive groupings. A kaleidoscope of people.

 Currently the black and pink ladies have all been exploding in a mass fit of coughing. As long as none of them snog me, I should be okay.

The airport is relatively quiet, a sprawl of high quality everything, air-conned to a chill. A geographical oddity made possible only by the virtue of oil.

Saying goodbye to India left me feeling a definite fondness for its generally warm hearted and colourfully diverse peoples. Delhi dropped away below the plane revealing the daytime city and its ever present brown halo of smog. The edge of the city fragments into breakaway chunks of peripheral townships in a sea of square fields. The townships become scraps of village until they almost disappear into infrequency. Thanks to the jet engine, fields becomes scrubland becomes desert within a very short space of time. I am revisiting where I was travelling by train only a day or so ago.

Coming back to the window some time later, Rajasthan’s desert is now Iraq, an even bleaker looking prospect. It’s very hard to discern any visible signs of life. It might as well be Mars.

Iraq runs out, becomes the Gulf of Arabia then becomes land again, presumably Dubai. What had previously looked bleak now looked even bleaker. An endless spread of sand, dunes and what seems to be linear plantations in an attempt to green the desert. Valiant efforts indeed.

Blocks of housing plots begin, Mondrian in concrete, planted in endless sand, with sand gardens. Umbilicals of tarmac hold them all together lest they drift away in the sea.

Like I said, Abu Dhabi airport is an exercise in financial will overcoming the constraints of geographical reality. Dubai fancies itself as an up and coming tourist destination, international sporting events host and even the latest trendy place to come clubbing. Clearly the moneyed ones have an eye to the future for when the oil dries up. Can’t say I fancy holidaying in a sky-rise hotel on an artificial archipelago shaped like a stylised palm tree though. I’d rather hide in an English ditch.

The airport though is home for the next several hours, with free newspapers, showers, internet and even a free meal voucher (I had chicken and spinach shawarma and salad). Wow, after the fresh veglessness of India, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed lettuce and tomato as much as I have today.

Anticipating Japan for the last two days, it’s peculiar to think that in roughly twenty fours, I shall probably be somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Fuji putting up my tent somewhere hopefully nice and patting myself on the back and talking to myself, telling myself how I finally bloody got here.

Perversely, I notice that I am avoiding learning the last remaining two Japanese CDs I have mp3ed. Now that I have written this, I now have blank time and no excuses.

How I am going to get on in Japan is a total mystery to me. Everything’s going to written in squiggle, maps incomprehensible, me and other people probably almost equally incomprehensible. What in other countries would be a relatively simple process, my challenge is to find my way to the south of Japan (I am aiming for Kagoshima city in Kyushu, the southernmost large island) and buy a secondhand bicycle.

I suspect the coming week is going to be flummoxing.

Unable to recline my planes seat I doze awkwardly for the eleven hour flight to Narita Tokyo. 

Filling the immigration form I use the address for a bike shop in Kagoshima as my required hotel address and borrow a phone number from somewhere else. No-one ever checks these things… They let me in!

Uh-oh. This is it now. I am aware that the airport is something of a warm bosom for the linguistically challenged, I linger. First I hide in a super hi tech toilet, wash everything and rid myself of two and a half days of sleeping on airport floors and generally being separated from a source of fresh underpants. Cleaned bits! Stage one of Japan integration mission successful!

Stage two. Buy a macaroni cheese burger. That’s macaroni cheese, made into a burger, in a bun. Less than a quid. Double surprisingly cheap; Japan is supposed to be expensive, and airports are always expensive. It’s so nice to eat something that isn’t spicy. I loved Indian food, but now actually I am really looking forwards to eating raw vegetables, salad, fresh fruit, and probably anything that doesn’t have chilli or any other spice in it. Bland food! Here I come!

Stage three. Attempt to buy Japanese dictionary and lonely planet book. No bookshop. Skip that then.

Stage four. Figure out how to get to Fuji-san (Mount Fuji). A very nice cheery lady with a hairstyle my mum would have worn in about 1972 speaking beautiful English is very happy to sell me a bus ticket to Tokyo Station in the centre of the city. (Gulp.) Then after that I have to find my way to a connecting bus stop and buy another ticket for Fuji-san.(uh-oh number two or several by now).

I chat to two young Americans, she with green hair piercings and glasses. He pretty regular looking. They’re on their way to Kyoto to find a wedding venue for themselves, the idea being to invite all their families from the states to where the two of them first met four years ago. How very romantic!

On the coach, I am looking through every available window, and decide that so far, Japan reminds me a lot of southern Sweden. The motorway skips through a landscape that alternates between hilly forested bits and flat agricultural land (rice paddis) much like southern Sweden does (but without the paddis of course).

Rolling through the city on an elevated highway, the city is a seemingly endless sea of skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. It makes the city of London look like somebody’s school project. Surprisingly I like the look of Tokyo. It looks clean and ordered. Rivers and canals bring some nature to the place, and they too look litter free. There are pockets of tree filled hilly parkland too. I have heard Tokyo described as some sort of megacity from the future and nothing I see illustrates this better than a series of double and triple decker Ariel highways that spiral in all directions without ever touching the ground. Most dramatic are the three that seem to have appeared from out of a high rise office building about halfway ups its height.

Tokyo is fantastic, but I am happy for now to be passing through. The bus drops me off. Somewhere. And the driver points out to me that where I need to be next is literally on the other side of the road. Clearly the Japanese have thought this one through. Maybe they had previous experience of foreign tourists attempting to make a beeline for Fuji-san and merely getting lost in the city.

Two cheery chappies directing the coaches sell me a ticket and five minutes later I am on board and on my way out of the city. By now, I am struggling to stay awake. I doze off and wake again at Fuji highlands, a great tangling mass of hotels and neon lit super gigantic rollercoasters. 

A few miles on and we arrive at Kawachujiko Station where I am to camp, somehow.

Its decidedly cold, and all my dry wearable clothes go on. Obliged to wear my green Indian turban thingy as I managed to leave my wooly hat on the plane.

Across the road I venture into a 7-11 store the Japanese equivalent of a Tesco’s One Stop. The shop is not as bizarre as I suspect some Japanese shops might be, and I buy half a loaf of wonderfully squishy white bread three carrots and three large onions. Even if I am going to be doing things on the cheap, I am determined that I will remain nutrished at least to some degree.

After my purchase I discover that it’s possible to get boiling water for any dry noodle purchases that I might make, so after the breads gone, I think one pound noodles with my fresh onion and carrot in thin slices added might be the way forwards. Especially considering how blinking cold it is.

I head down towards the lake (one of Fuji-sans five) and find a nice little spot between a road and some impossible to pitch a tent on lava boulders.

It’s cold, as I keep repeating. The air smells of somewhere familiar from my past. Mountains and fresh water. Maybe Scotland or Norway or both. Canada. By smell alone, I can tell I am going to like Japan. Even more so once I have got a proper hat.

The morning comes, it’s drizzling slightly but if fizzles to nothing. I had forgotten about rain, as well one might from hanging out in desert regions. My fingers are numb with cold and packing my tent makes my stomach feel tense. A man taking photos of his son takes photos of me, peculiar gaijin (foreigner). I don’t think he’s Japanese though. Russian maybe. A huddle of Chinese have turned up to take pictures of each other. I have a drip on my nose and I urgently need a piss.

Packed, and less than a hundred yards away is a public toilet. It’s lovely. It has an electric heater going full blast that I can thaw my hands on and then dry my still damp washing from the airport.

I do that, sit outside, make a half sandwich of onion and carrot and write this. Half an hour later and the mountain mist lifts. Four people cycle swan shaped pedallos on the lake. A lone man stands in a small rowing boat, fishing. I got here yesterday but I have only just started to arrive.

Given that five days ago I was riding through a desert on a camel called Julian. I think it’s only fair that it’s been something of a strange transition so far. This afternoon I took a bus up to mount Fuji that went about halfway up and no further because of snow blocking the road. My reason for coming to Fuji was to fulfill a desire to do a little puja for my parents to say thank you to them for giving me life. The image I had in my mind was to be under a nice tree somewhere with Fuji somewhere on the horizon or up Fuji itself looking out over a spectacular vista, and then doing my little dedication. My mum had said to me before she passed away fifteen years ago that she had always wanted to go to Japan but never had, so I would have to go for her. So here I am.

Halfway up Fuji, the tourist hotspot of Japan, I should have known what to expect, but being so cold today had not sufficiently engaged my brain at any point. The bus was very nice. Spacious, it didn’t rattle horribly like normal buses do, it even smelled nice. The ride was a continual gentle rise on a nice clean road passing through a continuous stretch of pristine forest. When we got to station four, the second from last stopping point up the mountain, we all piled out. There was a shop (of course) toilets (very handy) about twenty coaches and about four hundred Japanese tourists all doing selfies and generally cluttering up the place. My instinct is to escape to somewhere quieter. I walk up past the road closed barrier, get about two hundred metres and then turn back to let the bus driver know that I wasn’t coming back on the bus and that I was going to camp out. The driver is nowhere to be seen so I decide to do the right thing and let one of the traffic coordinators know my plan, not wanting to inadvertently set off a search party when the driver let’s it be known that he is missing a passenger for the return trip.

When I ask the traffic coordinator about walking further up the road I get an unequivocally stern no complete with grumpy face and crossed arms to illustrate further that his response can in no way whatsoever be misinterpreted as ‘yes’. Slightly taken Aback by his manner, I watch him as he continues with his endless tourist herding, making sure that they are out of the way of turning coaches as they take endless photos of each other, oblivious to everything else.

I think if I had his job, I think I would end up with a low opinion of tourists extremely quickly.

Still hoping to do my little dedication somewhere away from the brouhaha, I attempt to head down the road instead of up and again my way is swiftly blocked by another cross-armed whistle blowing grumpy face.

I am trapped in a three metre long space filled with coaches and bouncing Japanese tourists with their smartphones. All I wanted to do was my little dedication. Instead I am having the quintessential Japanese grockle experience. I am somewhat cheesed off by this and have to concede that this is not the place or the time. I have fifteen minutes before I am obliged to get back on the bus and head back down the hill. This truly is tourism at its box-ticking worst. Yes I went up Mount Fuji. And it was bollocks.

I will save my little ritual for when I find myself somewhere truly beautiful and peaceful and solitary.

Back in Kawaguchiko it is snowing. Not looking forwards to sleeping out. I buy a ticket for the bus tomorrow morning after taking lots of travel advice. The ticket cost about fifteen quid and when I look on the map to see where I am going I find that it is barely down the road. Crap, I should have just walked all night down the road and saved the money (but turned myself into a frozen zombie). Last week I paid slightly more money to travel in style for nearly a thousand kilometres. Better get used to it kid. Hopefully this ticket is only stupidly expensive because I’m at Fuji. 

Hiding in the train station waiting room until someone chucks me out. At least I have found an electrical socket to charge up my thingies.

Well my free indoors warm up lasted approximately fifteen minutes.

Outside it’s cold but feeling quite so bitter. Probably because I’ve had some hot noodles in me.

I tent up the same place as the night before and sleep fine until my 7am alarm. Pack tent and go wait for the 8.20 rip off bus to almost nowhere.

Now of course, the low cloud of yesterday has vanished and it looks like it’s going to be a nice sunny day. Walking up through town to the bus station I now get to see Mount Fuji in all its iconic glory, complete with town-stuff plastered across its bottom half. Still not quite the image I had in mind for my mum, but strangely fitting somehow. When I was little, our family would go away to the seaside. Sometimes we would leave Reading our home town on a nice sunny day, inking that this would be a good day for a day out. Then we would get to the seaside and the skis would have turned grey and windy and it would rain on us. And either my mum or my dad would say ‘There you go, someone must have told them the Terrys were coming.’

See what low self esteem I was born into? I’ve been doing my best to escape it ever since…

I take a few choice photos of Fuji hiding behind buildings that take up 90 percent of the picture, just to say ‘I was there’.

The conductor is very helpful smiley and looks dapper indeed in his grey suit peaked cap and white gloves. British coach operators take note!

It’s not a bus but a very smart coach and I am their only passenger.

My driver leaves town and rather than taking half an hour to get there, meanders through a complex network of roads, besides a huge pretty lake and then down more gangly highways for about another hour. So I don’t think I was being ripped off after all and I certainly was never ever going to walk to the station at Mishima!

At Mishima an elderly gentleman says hello and asks me. my travel plans in clunky English and I tell him my plan to cycle the length of Japan from Kagoshima to Wakkanai in clunky Japanese and English. He laughs and shaking my hand wishes me very good luck, and off he totters. Well that was nice.

I try to buy a ticket for Hiroshima, and amazingly it works out fine, the machine even likes my visa debit card. I am going to travel by local trains rather than the Shinkonsen bullet train. The bullet train costs 17000 yen and the method I have chosen is 10800 yen which still works out at whatever that divided by 160 is quid. I hastily scribble down the eight sets of train transfers I will have to make and feel very chuffed that I am making it happen all by myself.

The previous day at the tourist information office I had been emphatic that I did not want to get an overnight coach and now I glad I stuck with travelling by daytime. I get to see what Japan looks like. Which by any estimation, is kind of the whole point of going somewhere new…

I’ve changed my mind. Japan is not so much like southern Sweden but more like a mixture of Dutch agricultural flatlands hemmed in by impossible to cycle up thickly forested mountains in the Norwegian style. This all seems ever so slightly daunting until we hit the city landscapes. Which are enormous, more pervasive than anywhere I have ever been before and show no signs of turning back into nice casual cycling countryside for pretty much the entire journey. This is a worry. The map I have has no detail on it(and cycling is all about the details. Take a wrong turn and an hours cycling turns into annoyed confusion and three hours cycling). Add into this my rubbish Japanese. Then add into this the fact that it doesn’t seem to be getting any warmer the further down country we head. It’s still winter. I am going to freeze. I clearly haven’t planned this at all well and my anxiety levels have gone through the roof.

My one thousand kilometre journey east to west across the southern side of Honshu island lasts from10.50am to 23.54pm. Imagine being on one of the dull little tube trains that is heading out of the edge of London to Hatfield, and then make it a thousand miles long. Add on top of that that each time I need to transfer to another train I have somewhere between two and eight minutes to find some poor unsuspecting soul to unleash my trashed Japanese on, find out where the next train goes from, work out where I can go for a wee, and only once in the entire journey did I manage to find something coherent to eat (two lots of sushi rice and seaweed).

At one point I sat on a train and then realised that I didn’t have my red book with me… The little book with my train transfers and vital computer passwords and email addresses in it. I am just going to have to miss this train. Did I leave it on the last train? Or maybe it’s in the loo where I just dodged between five thousand dawdling Japs trying to ruin my chances of making my connection between having a vital pee break? The same five thousand Japs are still cluttering up the works. I completely totally ignore the various ‘do not rush’ signs.

And there’s my red diary. IN the toilet. As in sitting in the bowl, half soaked. At least the water looks clean and my diary isn’t hanging out with a turd or two. I rescue it, negotiate the dawdlers and incredibly, my train is still sitting waiting patiently for me. That all happened in less than six minutes folks. Six minutes I would be happy not to repeat, particularly the diary and poo poo near miss part.

After examining my diary for signs of tell-tale turdage or suspiciously yellowing edges, I spend the rest of the journey drying out my soggy and more than slightly disintegrating diary.

This diary is one of my vital travel elements, and the combination of messing up my diary, the scary rubbish for cycling scenery, how cold it is and being surrounded by an endlessly rotating crowd of miserablists with their heads buried in their smartphone is making me unhappy. (I have to mention at this point the several young geisha girls that have been travelling on the train. Looking only about eighteen, and clearly not prostitutes. One or two seem to be travelling with their mums. That’s what it looks like anyway).

The fact that I have barely eaten I think has some bearing on my mood. I am going to arrive at another huge city (Hiroshima population 1.5million) have no idea where I am going to sleep and it’s freezing. I feel idiotically vulnerable and like I am heading headlong into an unresolvable abyss. Barring spending between 50 to 100 quid on a hotel. I’m not going to do that, it’s against my religion, I don’t know what I am going to do 

At least I am glad that didn’t try hitch hiking. My zero knowledge of where anything is coupled with language barriers and the cold would have meant continuously being lost and cold and of would have all taken way too long. 

I feel so crap that I am feeling like I’ve made a huge mistake in coming this time of year, and that cycling is going to be impossible and cold and lonely and nothing but a Japanese style endurance test. Maybe I should go wwoofing in Okinawa in the pacific south. Maybe I should just give up and fly back to England.

Okay Rich, you’ve got twenty minutes before you get off to get your shit together and come up with a plan that doesn’t involve just walking round the city all night to prevent yourself from freezing to death.

Rummaging in my bag I find two shirts I can wear and a thick wooly hat. Okay that’s got to make things better. My not very detailed Japan guide shows a map of Hiroshima as having a park or two. Knowing that Japan is an ultra-safe culture, this might have tenting opportunities.

Off the train, and the platform leads to an expansive underground network of subways and shopping plazas. It’s warmer down here out of the wind, and there are one or two people in doorways, set in for the night. It’s all a bit glary lights for me and exposed and I walk on. Further on I find a little nook between some curved stairs and a cafe, with folded tables obscuring my potential nest. Shoving past the tables I get my Thermarest out and my sleeping bag. Earplugs in, hat over eyes, and kip.

Fully expecting to get chucked out by some grumpy security guard at some point, it happens, except that the security guard is very polite and I have managed to squeeze in several hours of useful meaningful sleep. I pack and leave, feeling quite refreshed actually.

This is enough to have shifted my dour mood thankfully, and I head off again into the city, in search of darkness. In this respect I suppose I am quite like a woodlouse.

In my guide book, ‘The Peace Tower’ on the edge of town looks promising. I find it. It’s on a steep hill. I could just put up my tent on this scrap of ground three feet wide between a tennis court and a wall next to some houses? Nope. Up the hill.

The hill winds past residential houses up a series of hairpins until I reach a Buddhist cemetery. It looks lime a Christian cemetery but with no crosses, just a sea of square shiny marble posts. There’s a bigger space to camp next to the cemetery, but that doesn’t feel sufficiently respectful so I carry on up. I have a suspicion that the top of the hill is going to be more cemetery, and I pass a track that leads into steep sided woodland, which is where I find my camping spot, a perfect antidote to my day. I sleep marvelously, and in the morning I am greeted by dappled sunlight twinkling rough the trees, warm sun and two crows right above cawing away, and making sure that I feel at home.

Seeing as how I am almost at the top of the hill anyway, I head up round the final bends in the ever rising road and reach the peace tower, which is actually a Buddhist stupa. Directly below is the upper reaches of the cemetery and then the view spreads out across the tops of even the tallest buildings in Hiroshima the city is jungle of concrete details and spreads all the way to the sea. In the sea and beyond, islands jut up out of the placid waters. Mountains zigzag up and down on a distant shore, hemming in the waters. The cemetery’s endlessly repeated squared columns is visually a curious echo of the city’s skyscrapers.
My plan for the day is simple. Go and find out when the daytime train to Kagoshima leaves tomorrow and go to pay respects to something of the city’s history.

Its a warm sunny day and I head on down to seven eleven and get noodles for breakfast. Just over a quid will buy me any of a wide selection of rattley plastic tubs with garish shiny depictions of dream noodle-based dinner and inscrutably scribbly writing on them. Making my purchase is evolving from a badly garbled origato gazaimas to sometimes just a respectful nod and back again to something more coherent. I tell myself off after each time I mess it up, but I will get the hang of it sooner rather than later I hope. It would be too easy to just slide into a habit of ‘Well I’ve got away with garbling words so far, so I’ll carry on the same’. That would be too English a thing to do.

After making my garbled purchase, now understanding how the whole instant noodle scheme works (the first time in Mount Fuji was totally confusing) I take my tub outside, furtle around in my pack and thinly slice some genuine carrot and eye-wateringly authentic onion into the as yet unwatered tub. Back into the shop, using the kettle which I now realise is always by the door, I fill the tub. Walking off to nice spot, it only takes a minute or two, and I have something approximating cheap nutritious filling hot food.

At the train station very nearby, I first do my morning wash in the stations toilets. At the sink a face and upper body wash, using their soap because it saves mine. Having a flannel is a godsend. Usually I will wash out my sticky socks and probably my underpants too. I have three pairs working in rotation. Ditto socks. Don’t read the next bit if you’re squeamish.

How do you have an all over body wash if you are not at home or using a forty quid a night hostel or hotel? Not brave enough to throw myself in the river and probably die of shock in the process, the next best thing is to wash in private in a nice confined space using a free bowl of water. That’s right… A toilet bowl. Checking it thoroughly for signs of poo scrapage or any other sign of nastiness, I hereby certify that this toilet is actually totally clean. An extra flush just for luck. In goes the flannel, and my down below parts get a good soap and scrub. Then into the bowl go my feet, one at a time obviously, and get a similar physically and psychologically refreshing clean up. Nothing in the world better than being clean again.

Many people will find this revolting, but a)it isn’t. It keeps me in the realm of the sociable. B)if you want to spend all your money on hotels then go ahead. I am in this for the long-haul; this isn’t a two week break from work for me, this is at least half a year away and out of doors, so this is what I will do. Thankfully India was cheap enough to use hostel facilities. Which was just as well because usually the sanitation on offer was… Well, unsanitary.

Clean, clean, clean! 

Still boggling that Japan seems to be completely litter free. What’s even more boggling is that there are almost no litter bins and the ones I do find are for recycling.

I walk walk walk down a long urban shopping street. At a busy crossroads I see a subway that goes under the traffic and apparently up the other side. Very sensible. Except when I get underground, it’s a shopping mall. It runs along the underside of the crossroads in all four directions for several hundred metres. Never thought I would ever be impressed by an underground shopping mall. I expect it’s only cos I’ve got my tourist goggles on. If I encountered it in England I would undoubtedly declare it to be further proof of our slow slide into Armageddon. Travel does that, strangely.

Eventually at the other end, I up an escalator and surface a hundred metres from what I have come to see.

I found myself slightly tearful at the peace tower, and again I feel the same way again, automatically upon sight of ‘the atomic bomb dome’ as it is known. Quite why I feel like this I don’t know. Maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to let out some tears of wobbliness, or maybe I just automatically tune into whatever people have brought here, or maybe it’s for what happened. I find the subject of the second world war has a habit of getting me rather emotional anyway. It affected both my mum and dad, and they have stories to tell. We live our own lives and we forget what hardships peoples endured. Makes me wobbly.

The atomic bomb dome is the only remaining reminder of the effects of the Americans(with British help) dropping the first atomic bomb on civilians on August 16? 1945. It exploded 600m above ground,160m southwest of the buildings remains. It killed 200,000 people instantly and flattened almost every single building in the thriving city. The building I am looking at was one of several left standing. All the others were torn down as the memory was too painful to leave them standing. This building, because it was almost directly under the blast, was left the most intact. When all the other buildings remains were removed, there was a call to keep this one standing as reminder to the world. Currently it is undergoing reinforcements to help it withstand the effects of possible earthquakes.

The remains are right next to one the cities several strands of river. On the other bank is a park. Two Japanese girls playing guitars sing their hearts out by the water. Children playing about ring a large memorial bell over and over. Next to it an exhibition of cases filled with paper origami cranes. A black cat with no tail slinks in and out of bushes, clearly not interested in winning anyone’s affections.

A Japanese musician is recording the sound of another large bell and has overdubbed it so that it is on a perpetual resonation loop of sound. He is playing a gig tonight and will use the sound for his performance.

Tourists abound, and this time nobody’s doing the usual bouncy grinning mugshot selfies.

Two ladies, clearly English about the same age as me. They look to me like they were probably Greenham Common Peace Camp supporters. (Greenham Common was once an American airbase one mile from where I lived in Newbury in southern England. It housed 96 nuclear-armed cruise missiles with enough capability to wipe two thirds of the entire planet at the press of a single button. Three miles down the road, Halfway between there and where I had grown up, was the AWRE; the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, more infamously known as Aldermaston, the base point for the first CND Marches in the mid 1950s. Its radioactive water outflow passed under our school playing fields and into the River Thames at Pangbourne where my first girlfriend lived. So if anyone out there ever thought I had a weird grasp on reality, then I can only say that it’s nothing compared to what I grew up surrounded by.

Its getting dark, so I head back the long trek back up to my temporary accommodation. It’s a nice feeling knowing that I have a definite comfy spot to sleep in.

Up tent, sit… Read a little Josie dew and her cycling in Japan book, a ride in the neon sun. Sleep.
Next morning, my train leaves at 10.51 so time for a leisurely lie in… Tent down, sit, and head down into the city. Lots of kids are having some sort of Sunday morning sports session nearby but I can’t see them. I can hear them though, and seems to involve a group leader shouting instructions and the kids, between their general massed-kid noise, shouting ‘HAI!’ A lot. Sounds like fun anyway. 

Hai! 

That well known Japanese phrase or saying. Versatile, it could mean any number of things depending on the context; 

Yes!

Absolutely!

I’ll get right to it!

Okay!

If I must!

I’m not really into this but at least I’m pretending to be enthusiastic!

Mmmmmm! More slowly!

Oh my god I think I just had an orgasm!

Shit I’ve lost my socks again!

Aww Jesus! Which wanker put them in the fucking toaster?!

Don’t try to learn Japanese from me. You will fail dismally.
On the train again, more cityscapes for the next couple of hours. A very sweet train ticket collector on board very kindly writes in perfect English on a small sheet of paper the transfers I need to make so as not to miss any trains. It’s amazing how much difference such a simple thoughtful act can make. I give her a little bow and an origato gazaimas for her effort.

Its only once the train gets into Kyushu that the worrying endless sea of concrete and skyscrapers begins to wane. All this time I had been wondering what the hell I was setting myself up for.

Okay, time for a geography lesson… Japan consists of thousands of islands, most of them insignificant, unless you happen to be a seagull. The big one in the middle is Honshu and has Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and all the main cities and, it would seem so far, I hope to god, is where almost everybody lives. The southern end is one thousand miles of Birmingham meets Manhattan. It’s horrid. I never been anywhere so geographically schizophrenic. On the one hand, you have pristine spotless wall to wall conurbation. At the same time, the skyline is filled with untouched impenetrable mountains filled with natural forest. Maybe the presence of all this equally unending forest is what keeps the Japanese mentally in check.

England arose out of the sea, lifting up gradually as a relatively flattish wobbly object, a mountain or several here and there, then the ice age came and scrubbed it all flattish again. The kind of place you can spread out in and grow all kinds of stuff cos you’ve got nice easy gradients that will support grain, vegetables cattle, sheep, timber.

Japan on the other hand, exists only because of tectonic plates rubbing each other up the wrong way, and the resulting volcanic eruptions spewing violently up out of the sea in a decidedly upwards direction. Three quarters of Japans land mass is dead volcanoes. And no ice age has ever come along to rub it all flatter, so what there is, is either flat as a pancake, or forty degree angles covered in forest. Nothing in between so far have I seen.

So given the squeeze on occupiable space, what remains doesn’t leave so much for agriculture. I suspect this is probably why Japans food base is so famously seawardly-oriented.

So that’s Honshu, the main island, Hokkaido is the big empty island in the north, and Kyushu, where I am now is the most southern of the big islands. There’s a couple of smaller ones between Kyushu and Honshu and I have forgotten what they are called. Actually Kyushu isn’t an island. But for a short tiny narrow bridge of land in between, it very almost is an island.

Relief beyond measure…. The train passes through rather a lot of nothing. For a long time. Lots of forest with occasional little villages. This is what I want!!!!

Then, worryingly, Beppu, Oita and some other places I don’t remember the names of, doing that city thing again. This time it’s not so bad. No skyscrapers. Less buildings. I think I can cope with that.

The train winds past little bays. Like Cornwall. Nice. I can cope with cycling that.

By now, I am realising that my currently worn socks and underpants and also my trousers need refreshing. I go hide in the train toilet and wash them all. I am wearing both pairs of ultra-thin quick-drying trousers and have no option but to give them a thorough squeeze out after washing them and then put them straight back on. I undoubtedly look like I have totally pissed myself. Only I haven’t. Sitting back down in my seat on the nice warm train, it’s only a matter of an hour before both pairs are almost completely dry.

Eventually the train arrives in darkness at Kagoshima, a big seaside town.

I spy a ‘Family Mart’ and go get apples (hurrah!) carrots and a big noodle tub. Onions and carrot in my noodle tub, some vital vitamin C, and some internal heat to help make sure I sleep warmly.

My nest radar is on the blink. Not sure which direction to head. Having looked on my map, I thought I found a park by the sea, but it’s too exposed and too well lit. Wandering around the docks, I rub up along some likely looking bushes til I find what I am looking for. Behind a tall megalith of a rock, a pile of dried coconut fronds lay conveniently to offer me a slightly crunchy bed in a little hideaway nook out of view. And of course, I sleep beautifully.

In the morning, interestingly, I seem to be next to a pile of abandoned bikes. One looks likely; flat tyres, no lock, clearly abandoned as it has no saddle. Single geared though. Must have gears. Go sit in park, eat second nutritious and gigantic apple, sit, write this…

Monday March 28?

Usually I write at the end of the day, but the most astonishing thing just happened. I had packed up and was wandering around on the seafront, idly cogitating a pro-bike plan, thinking that finding a tourist information point would be useful in order to find out where the bike shop I had found online actually was in real life. Whilst wandering I found an outside electric socket. Disconnecting a photo booth machine for half an hour, I put about ten percent charge into my kindle so that I can carry on using it to write. Whilst waiting, I was cobbling together some words in Japanese from my phrase book hopefully in explanation of how I wanted to buy the cheapest bike possible so that I didn’t have to think about reselling it when I got to Wakkanai.

This was going to be slightly tricky, but I was gearing up to approach this linguistic obstacle course. It’s amazing how much language is really useful. Things that would be simple in my own language, suddenly appear enormously subtle and complicated in someone else’s.

Having cobbled some words that probably in reality would only elicit blank bemusement, I stow them in my pack.

I spot four decidedly European chaps on bikes. Now they look like a good bet in terms of maybe having some useful information.

Spotting their badges, I ask if they are Mormons, which indeed they turn out to be. The fact that they are in their early twenty’s and come in multiples of two also is a signifier. I ask if they know where a bike shop is, and if they know where I can get a recycled bike or one that’s dirt cheap. We look on a couple of maps, and a Japanese interpreter friend of theirs decides that the bike shop is too far away. So discussion in Japanese ensues. Is that it then? Is that the end of the matter?

It seems it isn’t. It seems that one of their number left a couple of months ago (five is a bit odd to Mormons) and left his bike behind. Maybe I would like it?

Anticipating a price, or the bike being a crock, I still say yes. A firm offer of a bike is better than remaining even clueless as to finding my way round town. They muster their collective minds and figure out, whether the bike is good to use, whether it needs a new tyre and tube… Two of them, Elder Johnson and elder lay race off back to the apartment and get the bike ready. I walk with Elder Beer and Elder Muehlstein and discuss how life as a Mormon is for them.

Three of them are from Utah, and one is from Maryland. They are buddied into pairs, and of each pair, one has been out here a year already and is ‘showing the other the ropes’. They are out here for two years, are based currently in Kagoshima, and their patch is from Hiroshima all the way to the south, so they move to a new area every six or so weeks. They spend their mornings reading scripture from the book of Mormon and the king James bible and then in the evenings they do their evangelical thing of talking to people in the street and going house to house. As I say to them, that’s a real training for your faith definitely.

After a half mile walk we arrive at the apartment block to see elders lay and Johnson rapidly cleaning up the bike and fixing a new tube to it and generally getting it fettled. This is no mamachari one-gear crock, but a super lightweight Giant mountain bike. It’s a very nice bike indeed. I am overwhelmed with appreciation, I almost cry. I can’t thank them enough. Now they are discussing how to go about getting a basket and rack fixed to it, and descriptions of how to get to a shop about a mile away are given, and then it turns out the shop right next to us has bike stuff too. We all go in the shop, and one of the better Japanese speakers explains to the bike shop guy what I need, and he duly puts it all together for me. Even that is something that would have been difficult of me to do on my own.

I ask if I can take a photo of them, explaining that this is only the second time I have taken a picture of anyone in all my time away. I ask also for an email address so I can let them know how I am doing with the bike and to thank them some more.

I am stunned. My jaw is dropped. Like the lady ticket collector on the train yesterday, how amazing it is to help somebody. This is affecting me deeply though. I am acutely aware that even as I approach my fifties, what I am doing right now serves no useful purpose for anyone else that I am aware of. It is a wonderful thing to live a life of service, and something I intend to focus on when I get back to England most definitely.

We say goodbye in the supermarket, I bow to them all and then shake hands with them twice, and them I go and retrieve the bike from the guy who is fixing the basket to it.

I get a package of meaty things to breakfast and ground me, and head off into the sunshine to find the bike shop with the rack.

Rack sorted and a few bikey bits. I go do internet thing and then head back for a nights kip, full of gratitude and wondering how I am going to mount the contents of my rucksack to the bike. With an awful lot of string and elasticated thingies I suspect.
Camped between a harbour full of plastically clonking boats and a car park. Out in the open but strangely secluded because the way the street lights are arranged.

In the morning sort out a letter aimed at getting me a huge tax rebate back in the UK and send four postcards, which at first were going to cost me twenty quid until I get offered the skinflint version for one tenth of the cost. Spend an hour in the discount shop buying string and elastic and nosh. Head for the ferry and get waved on right at the last minute. This is it! I’m doing it now!

I get talking with Takashi who has his bike parked next to mine on the ferry, and with his Canadian accent from having spent two years in Toronto he accompanies me for the first ten miles round Sakarawajima A real live actually puffing out ash and occasionally lava volcano.

Not having yet rearranged my stuff, I cycle with my pack on my back which is rather more effort than it ought to be. As soon as Takashi and me separate, I spend an hour figuring out how to load my bike.

I ride another couple of hours to just south of Taramizu and camp on a lovely quiet beach used only by fishermen. I feel very peaceful. Now I have finally started which is a relief, and there’s nothing quite like cycling for getting me nicely balanced. Behind me, slightly weather beaten funky seaside houses made of wood with sea detritus knick-knacks cluttering up the gardens. My kind of place. Glow in the dark algae flashes occasionally sparks of greeny blue as small one foot waves break on the beach.
March 30

I am hoping to get to Cape Sata the most southerly point today. I don’t even know how far it is.

Much of the cycling on the coast is pretty easy, undulating a little. It is only once I get towards Data that, because of my slightly idiosyncratic destination, the road becomes hard going. It’s only in the last eight kilometres that I need to get off and push. I will be coming back the same way tomorrow, and although I have some phenomenally long freewheeling downhill runs today, tomorrow is going to have some slow uphill slogs.

Its been raining on and off continuously, and this is going to have at least two effects. Firstly it is going to make drying newly washed clothes very difficult and will make me smell like the worst kind of wet dog. The more worrying effect is that I have equipment that will have to work quite hard at not getting wet; map books, kindle, phone,, batteries, power charger.

Finally at the Cape, the road abruptly stops and becomes a car park and a pedestrian tunnel to the last few hundred metres to the actual actual Cape. I park the bike and disappear into the monkey filled jungly forest. Halfway in, I meet a very placid black boar, happily munching away on something and quite unbothered by me. Next to her is a red and white Buddhist shrine, and then an upwardly rising hairpin bending boardwalk that rises to my begin point, which overlooks a lighthouse and waves crashing on rocks far below. Think Cornwall. But with monkeys and much more palm trees.

Also here at the same time, three other cyclists; one a map guy from mid Honshu cycling clockwise round Kyushu, and two English cyclists, a couple Liz and Alex. We take photos to prove we are here. My English couple are also starting their end to end trip, and as it is six pm, I imagine it’s about camping up time. Half hoping for a bit of a chat, they leave more or less immediately. They seem very anti social which is a shame. Maybe they are in very couple mode and just want go and shag somewhere. Who knows.

Just around the corner from the shrine, I up tent. Monkeys are crashing about above me, hooting occasionally whilst they head for wherever they like best to sleep. I sit, eat a seaweed and fish sausage sandwich and sleep.
I awake to tropical rain and my own stinkiness. I write and pack up to leave. I have decided my morning sit is going to happen when I need my first morning break. Makes most use of my time that way.
March 30th

Yesterday was very very stop-starty; taking photos, putting on raincoat, adjusting bags, taking off raincoat, getting drinkable water, lunch, shopping…. This is all fine. The first few days should be reasonably gentle to get muscles into initial motion. Stop whenever I feel like but don’t linger in a slobbing out kind of way.

Lots of interesting vegetables being grown on the way here. Worthy of further investigation and possibly even future cultivation.

Right, enough of this; out into the day. First stop, toilets five miles away, for a major wash.

Up tent, say good morning to some decidedly shy monkeys; (discernable mostly by their ariel crashing about noise) and then out through the pedestrian tunnel for one hundred metres. The view is beautiful and now feels like a good time to make my honorific ritual to my mum and dad. I find a spot up off the road overlooking the sea, place my two photocopied photos, one of my mum and one of both of them together, smiling. Placing them both at the foot of a gnarly old tree. I thank them for bring me into the world. There’s more to it than that, but I won’t write that here. Rain drops fall onto the paper, and very soon the picture be mush. And that’s completely how I expect it to be.
My first stretch is a nice easy downhill for a mile, but I know what else is coming tourist because I am mostly going to be retracing my tracks. In Sata I wash, and fill my water bottle. 

I can’t resist the beach. You can’t come all this way south and not dip a toe in the sea can you?

So I do and it is lovely; not too cold. It’s only a small bay but it curves majestically in that familiar symmetry that gorgeous bays have with their hills door stopping both ends. Walking back up the beach afterwards to put my socks back on (getting the sand off is tricky) out of nowhere chimes a minute of Japanese jingle. Maybe it does it on the hour. I don’t know I don’t have a watch. There I was, soaking up the wonderful whoosh of waves breaking on the sand then :’ bing bong clang ting bing bang bong!’ Weird.
What had seemed like a fifteen mile downhill free ride yesterday now I find is actually not too hard a climb in second and first gears. I only have to stop once which is pretty good for the start of a trip. The mountains are sublime, things hooting, birds calling, monkeys undoubtedly crashing about. Little frogs make glottal maraca noises that sound like over sized crickets.

Morning mist rises out of the densely forested slopes, all makes for a very lovely atmosphere.

Yesterday I saw a crow hooking its beak into what looked rather like a dead sea otter, and then a sea eagle wheeling round the pair of them. Today passing the same spot, all have gone.

Back up past all the cute little fish-box dwellings, some wooden and rickety, some more stolidly concrete. Sometimes whole coves of village that smell of crabmeat and fish and seaweed.

It rains solidly all day. Only stopping for about one minute, two times. I discover that my newly dubbin-ed boots at the start of India are now totally un-waterproof. I ride all day with totally wet feet. I have my waterproof coat on, hood up all day. My trousers are wet through.

I stop start several times and finally reach the edge of Kanoya. It’s five pm. I could go further, maybe out the other side of the town/city whichever it is, but the sky looks gloomy, I am sodden and tired. I warm up at a family mart on a big tub of noodles, end go find a camping spot near an airbase I had recently cycled past.

The rain carries on, relentlessly. I soon discover that just as my boots have lost their weatherproofing, so too has my tent. This is double pain in the neck as I have a down sleeping bag which if it gets wet is permanently ruined.

Again, my job is to keep wet things and dry things separate. Moldy damp things can usually be dried by body heat. Amazingly, I somehow manage to keep the inwardly bound water under control. I fling my extra groundsheet over the outside of the tent as well my raincoat and it’s pretty much sorted. I manage to sleep, after first retreating into memories of lovely things and people from back home. Cuddling black labradors and wily old cats, drinking tea at Dons, beautiful places from home, Avebury, West Kennet Long Barrow, tea with the Jakes’s.

Its morning now and the sun has sort of got its hat on. I set some stuff out to drip dry and steam, but the rain comes again briefly to. Put the kybosh on properly drying anything. It’s stopped again. I will make attempt number two at drying stuff. A lovely bird in the bamboo hedge next to me. Bird song is the sound of the gods being pleased. Skylarks.
April 1st Kenoya

Long distance cycling is a matter of all the different component aspects and initial unknowable factors joggling themselves into sync with each other until what you end up with is sense of motive rhythm.

Yesterday, I was wet all day, I didn’t push too hard; there’s no sense in doing that, because whatever you might think you gain in miles one day by pushing, you will lose the next through being too tired. Conversely there is nothing to worry about if you get held up seemingly unnecessarily; you are getting a free regenerative time that will make the next bit that little bit easier and swifter without you even needing to try.

As I was saying, yesterday was a day of non-stop rain. In the night it rained so hard that it pushed through the impermeability limits of my tents material and I spent an hour or two awake figuring out how to deal with it. Today felt like a bit of a not really trying too hard sort of day, which after the previous night, pushing really would have been a mistake. 

Amongst the factors that require falling into place were; not knowing how to most effectively read my maps and satnav to get me across the large town of Kushira (the actual town did not seem to really resemble what was on my satnav let alone the maps).

Finding a shop that might sell me something specific requires eagle eyes and some wild guessing. It took three attempts to find a shop that I could buy a small tarpaulin in. The first shop I tried sold flowers and pot pourri. Very nice in a damp tent, but not really solving the problem. The second sold clothes. In England it’s easy; you want gardenny stuff, you just look for the buildings with ‘Homebase’ or ‘B and Q’ on it. Their colour schemed advertising will help you home in on them. So far I have learned 7/11, Lawson’s and family mart which are easy to find because they are all written In English and not a series of squiggles.

I spot a shop with stacks of compost bags and paving slabs outside. Clearly the Japanese version of B and Q. My theory turns out to be correct, and so my load is now one totally conspicuous non-camoflagey blue plastic tarpaulin the heavier.

The sun came out and after a previous soaking, it’s always a good idea to get everything dry again whilst it is possible to. For all I knew, it would return to a repeat of yesterdays weather by the afternoon.

I found a nice little empty beach and unpacked everything that had got damp or wet and spread it all out to dry. I did my first proper sit for a while and got everything back to square one. Need to be careful of taking care of my feet. Two days of wet boots has started to make the skin split 

between my toes. Apply tea tree oil, air feet and have cleaner drier socks for when I head off again.

I can only presume that the area I am in must be where people come on holiday to, it truly is beautiful, like the isle of Skye with sandy beaches round every corner and coconut palms.

Why didn’t I buy a pump when I was buying bike stuff in Kagoshima? Cos I had already spent fair chunk of cash already. Yeah, but you can’t expect to ride 3000 kilometres and NOT need a pump. what happens if you get a flattie ten miles from the nearest anything?

sure enough, day two, April the first as in April Fools Fay, my front tyre goes down, rapidly. I wheel the bike back a hundred metres to one of the frequent roadside fruit and veg stalls and point at my flat tyre and mime the action for pumping it back up again. Nice smiley man gets on his phone and after a minute or two, he guides me across the road to a car garage where a middle aged man and his apprentice set to my bike in earnest. 

All I wanted was to borrow a pump. The rest I am perfectly capable of doing myself. The young apprentice takes the tyre from the wheel, finds the two offending holes and then proceeds to go at the offending areas with a hefty automobile workshop sized sanding machine. When he’s done that, he finds some huge patches, applies some glue, waits a moment, and then uses a technique I have never seen used in mending a puncture: he bashes the patches on with a mallet. Really. I am a little anxious. yes they seem very keen to be seen to be doing a thorough job, but mallets? I look in my phrasebook and find the Nihongo for ‘How much is this going to cost me?’ Mr. Senior Workshop umms and ahhs and then without giving me an answer proceeds to flick through the book. Maybe he is looking for the section with large numbers in it.

His wife offers me a small tin of cold Georgia black coffee. Just add that to the bill. Without knowing much Japanese there doesn’t seem to be very much I can do to influence what’s happening. Oh well; it is what it is. He takes a photo of the tyre. I think he is trying to track down where I can buy a new one. The tyre is indeed incredibly worn; maybe about four millimeters thick.

The usual stilted conversation ensues. I can’t help but feel rather embarrassed by my claim to be cycling all the way to the north of Japan. ‘What? Without a bicycle pump?!’

Yes. I am indeed on this occasion, a twit.

The tyre is fixed, we all collectively mess about with the brakes because they seem to be playing up, a by-standing chap who is finding much amusement in the ill-prepared Englishman offers me one of the English words he knows. ‘Squashy!’ He says pointing at the action of my brake calipers. ‘Yes’ I reply, ‘squashy’ as if to confirm his correct observation.

‘Squashy!’ He says again. I think he really means it this time.

‘Ah yes! Squashy!’ I say again. It’s amazing the drivel that people will enthusiastically speak to each other in order to establish camaraderie when more intelligent conversation is not available.

Mr. Workshop Senior shows me the words ‘free service’ on the translator on his phone. No doubt I have brought some small measure of entertainment to their afternoon.

I ‘Origato gazaimas and sayonara’ them goodbye and cycle away waving. 

Twenty seconds later I return, pointing at my tyre patches and glue left on the workshop floor. I do a carbon copy of my ‘origato gazaimas and sayonara’ again, just for effect. This time I really do mean it, and I am gone.

About three miles down the road, I reach the small town of Kushima where it only takes me two goes at finding a shop that will sell me a bike pump.

The checkout lady is extremely jolly, and in reciprocation of her jolliness, I present her with my payment with a ‘Kazzam!!’ instead of some crappy bodged Japanese.

‘Kazzam!’ seems to have had more of an effect than some of my interactions so far. Maybe this is the way forwards for me in shops. ‘Zap! I want these noodles!’, ‘Kapow! Here’s my money!’, ‘Kerr-unch! How do I get the water out of the kettle please?!’

I think I may have hit upon a new international language that could succeed where Esperanto has failed. I will call it ‘Batmanese’.

Its heading towards bedtime, or at least tent up time. Rather than heading inland up the road, I wind back slightly in search of the ambience of crashing waves on sand.

I thought of a crap joke after cycling past a planetary observatory today;

Q: Why didn’t the astronomer buy a new telescope?

A: Because the cost was astronomical.

Tent up, sandwich, write, nice waves and the sound of very many frogs trying to get a shag. Statistically speaking, they mostly stand a pretty good chance of success. Whereas me on the other hand, I am only one.
April 2nd Kushima

A sublimely decent kip, and a wake up spot that is a visual breakfast all by itself. Gently breaking waves, mist rising over distant mountains out beyond the sea. Echoed islands and birdsong. And a man practicing his golf putting on the beach. When he has done I nip down to the shoreline and wash a few things. Never use soap in the sea. I learned from being in Agra that soap and salt water makes nasty sticky mess. So soap free wash. It will make everything salty but at least it will get most dirt and smells out.

A nice sit.

Then a banana and chocolate spread sandwich for breakfast. Pack away.

Cycling out through Mishima, I decide that today should be a day for putting a few more concerted miles in. I stop after a mile and re-sit my front wheel so that it runs freely. After yesterdays tyre repair I don’t think it went back in quite right. I stop again some way on and can’t help wondering why I am carrying my rucksack, there are a few other things I could do with off-loading too that I’m not likely to use on the way. It always seems on trips like this I will have a ‘dead-weight moment’ somewhere in the first or second week. It usually involves throwing things away and posting some other things. As I have stopped to ponder how much uselessness I am dragging about, I notice that I’m next to a post office. I cycle on, chewing on the idea of posting stuff on to Wakkanai post office where I hope to reach my ultimate destination.

About ten kilometres on at the little coastal town of Nango it occurs to me that finding a post office in a small town is going to be much easier than finding one in a big town. I don’t even know what a post office looks like here. I start keeping an eye out for what might be one and find one almost straight away. It’s ten past midday and it’s shut. It doesn’t say on the door when it will be open again. It is threatening to rain and if I am to post my pack I need to keep it dry. I cover the pack and think to head for the next town. Or maybe stay here. Prevaricating, I see a post office van. Maybe it is heading to the post office and it will open again.

The van doesn’t, and neither does the post office. I ask a lady when the post office will open. She says it’s shut all day. Asking me why I need the post office I explain to her that I want to post my rucksack. She invites me in for a cup of tea and offers to take me to Nichintin?? Town twenty miles up the road to a post office that would be open.

What happens next is similar to what happened with the bicycle tyre. Phone calls are made, friends turn up and ask if they can help. Someone with better English helps moves things further on, then a plan is hatched. I am to leave my bag with Michiko And then I will phone her near the time I want my bag, and then she will post it to where I need it to be and then I will collect it.

Addresses and phone numbers and email addresses are exchanged. Problem solved. Then I am invited to lunch. I ate a big pot of noodles just before I got here, but I accept anyway as she is such a sweet lady.

With Michiko and her elderly mother I am treated to a spread of sushi, chicken tempura, noodles and aged pickled daikon (root vegetable, very like sauerkraut).

We chat, eat and take photos and it is all very jovial. 

She runs a shop selling teas and locally made knick-knacks. One or two other people arrive, and everyone says hello to the Englishman. One lady is asking me where I am sleeping tonight and is touching my bike saddle saying it must get uncomfortable. I think she may be flirting with me…

Fully stuffed, I get given a doggy bag of sushi to take with me, some instant teas in a little bag. Someone else gives me some satsumas… 

Heading off, there are now six middle aged ladies to wave goodbye to, and one slightly gruff looking husband (Michiko’s). Maybe he missed out on lunch because of me or something. I get the impression he is the jealous type. Well anyway, all the ladies are very friendly, and off I wobble, waving a cheery sayonara goodbye as I go.

I get round a corner and my impromptu replacement bag decides to fall off. I tuck it under my arm and decide to sort it out further on, so as not to get further ensnared in the helpful ladies. They really did pull out all the stops for me, and any further interaction with them would be impolite really, so off I go.

The sushi kicks in, and I manage to plough through forty kilometres of gorgeous flat coast-hugging road barely without a stop and sometimes into headwinds without even having to change down from top gear. Whether it’s because I have eaten properly, or because I I’ve dumped some weight or whether it’s because I feel supremely pleased, I seem to be racing long. Maybe it’s because of all three.

Eventually I stop off to get water at some kind of diner place, and I meet ‘Massia’ which sounds like ‘messiah’. He is out on a fifty kilometre run, speaks very good English and is therefore a pleasure to chat with. He is practicing for a hundred kilometre run next month. He tells me that thirty years ago he cycled the Japan end to end himself. I ask him if the scenery is as good in other places as it is here, and he confirms that indeed it is. Oh I am so pleased.

Suddenly it’s 6.30pm, it seems like it might start to rain and the sky is starting to darken. I spy a spot near a harbour bout a mile away. 

In just about enough remaining light I tent up on a spot of waste ground with long grass.

April 3rd. South of Aoshima

Nothing specifically to do with the day to report. More cycling through semi urban shopping thing. A taste of southern Honshu to come. Things about Japan I have liked seeing so far:

Honda Super Cubs (c90s). There are plenty of them about, and what could be a lovelier sight than that of a be suited salary man on his way home from work with a big smile on his face, possibly because he is riding the original funky moped.

Honda C90s,C70s and C50s are getting rarer in Britain, so it’s nice to see them still doing their thing in the land of their maker. Aesthetically, they fit the Japanese sensibility so well anyway, for things that are small but efficient.

On the road you will see lots of stumpy box shaped cars and vans. If you have ever seen the odd looking vehicles at you sometimes see on ‘build your own city’ simulation games where all the vehicles look kind of stunted, well that’s what they look like here. Not all of them, but a lot of them. The French and the Italian peasant farmers have their little Piaggio three wheeler vans that are tiny, but big enough for going to market in. Handy if you live in one of those squiddly little places built seven hundred years before anyone could conceive of cars. Piaggio build probably half the tuk-tuks, certainly in India, possibly the rest of Asia. Another tiny vehicle, no bigger than absolutely necessary, perfectly shaped for squeezing through impossible gaps in crazy crazy Indian traffic. Perfect; appropriate. Everything moves along.

In Japan, even though there’s ample space (well there is here anyway), small is what the Japanese like to do. Squeezy little houses that sometimes could be over sized potting sheds, and squeezy little vans that where they lack in length and width, they rise upwards, higher than any European van would. A bit like how they build in their cities I suppose.

Small scale, certainly where I have been so far, is the way that agriculture seems to happen. Many people out in fields and paddies. Many many polytunnels. No tractors at all; it’s the wrong landscape for them. Paddies wouldn’t last five minutes with a dirty great tractor hacking through all those delicately carved out contoured beds. Little ride on Cultivators I see. Lots of roadside market pitches, selling locally grown stuff. Seasonal food. Completely unlike the ridiculous ‘farm shops’ we have in the UK, where three quarters or more of what they sell they didn’t grow and invariably involves the same old generic fake homemade jams, and ye olde fudge at vastly over-inflated prices. How British farms are supposed to make a real living I don’t know. Our agricultural economy is in a dire tangle. It would nice to think that the Japanese have got theirs sorted.

They certainly seem to take enormous pride in their food, so it’s possible that they also take due care with how they produce it. Except whales. Yeah, I know…

Something else the Japanese take great care over is their cyclists. In about four hundred miles of cycling so far, only about four miles has had no kind of cycle provision. Sometimes it’s an uppy downy bumpy old bit of tarmac path, but it’s always there. Very often the cycle paths are about three metres wide, safely separated by barriers or hedge from the main road. Would you believe that it is possible to cycle all the length of a busy dual carriageway and still enjoy the ride? Well you will if you’re Dutch.

Only once did I get confused about where I was supposed to cycle next (and that lead to riding over brambles and getting a puncture…. Doh.)

Tunnels, and there are quite a few of them riddling their way through the mountains have mostly been a pleasure of the decidedly surreal kind. Like being inside the stomach of a gigantic concrete worm. Yes I did take too much acid when I was younger. Anyway… 

Reaching a tunnel is often a welcome sign that I no longer need to keep pedalling quite so hard, because usually they arrive just as a long meandering climb upwards is done. You ride through the tunnel, usually almost but not quite horizontal. I suppose they need to let the rain run out. And the light at the end of the tunnel… That’s the good bit, because of course it means you get to freewheel, probably, hopefully, for at least the distance it took you to get all the way up here. Long gradual descents I prefer best. Maximum free riding, minimum scare factor and brake pad burn out.

In their zeal for safety, the squillions of sets of traffic lights at every (fucking) crossroads especially in the built up areas drive me nuts. They bring out the (barely forgotten) English anarchist cyclist in me. 

Every one sits and waits respectfully in their cars and on their bicycles until the lights change and tell them that, yes they can go now. This is all very well, but nine times out of ten, the lights are on red, nobody moves and nothing is coming or going anywhere. So at first, I would just sit there too. Until I started wondering how much time and miles I would lose during the course of my trip, just waiting waiting waiting for the bloody light to turn green.

So now, I still like those lights, they keep everybody out of hospital, but now if there’s nothing going on, I am going use my brain and take some initiative. Probably leaving everyone shocked at the behaviour of the wicked gaijin.

What else about Japan?

Oh yeah! Japanese bikes!

What I love about travelling is each countries own little design innovations that for some reason, no matter how intelligent or brilliant they are, don’t get to happen outside their own country.

Why isn’t England full of tuk-tuks? Our roads would work better. Why don’t the English use bidets? Because we are frightened of our bottoms. Why don’t we have showers in the same place as the toilets like they do in Holland? Why don’t we do like the eastern Europeans and the Finns and have Kakelhofens? A great big brick oven that costs almost nothing to build and will cook your evening meal and then heat your house all night for free?

I have a slightly warped passion for bicycle design, and completely unbeknownst to me before I came here, Japan has a whole range of funky little bikes happening that would look good in nerdy bike mags. Small wheeled bikes with almost full sized frames. Folders with minimal tubing. Okay I’ll shut up, I’m just being a nerd.

April 4th. Takanabe.

Yesterday my day finished with me being full of energy like I could have cycled for another 20km but didn’t. That felt a bit weird somehow. To compensate, I awoke spontaneously at 5.40am and decided to just go, and not to fuck about too much. Yesterday I sat when I woke up and by the time I had packed the bike it was 10.30am.

This morning I had already cycled 25km by 9.30am. Clearly this is the way to run my day. Do my sit at the end of the day, when it’s dark and I’m not going anywhere anyway. At the rate I am going today, I should end up doing twice what I have been cycling so far.

All fired up and raring to make some significant progress, passing through Hyuga city my rear tyre goes flat. Crap. When I inspect the tyre, not only do I have a puncture caused by wire in the tread breaking off inside, but I also am down to the bare threads inside the tread about two thirds of the way round. When the tyre is wet, it looks perfectly okay. Now I can see that this puncture was a gift. I am in just the right place to get new tyres, rather than twenty miles from the nearest bike shop with an immovable pile of bike.

After asking directions, it turns out that I have had my little event literally three hundred metres from a bike shop. The nice man duly offers me two new tyres (except he states that one is a bit old), we fit them, and off I go. Very happy to have spent thirty quid, knowing that I really wasn’t going anywhere much further with the bike without getting into difficulty. Maybe now I won’t have a puncture every day too…

Very happy.

8kms down the road, a brief wobbling from the rear and the tyre goes flat. When I look to see what’s up, the sidewalls of the not-so-new new tyre have completely crumbled away to nothing leaving only the rim wires connected to the tread by hundreds of threads. I try wheeling the bike. The tyre totally disintegrates, along with my good temper. Now what do I do?

Take the bike back to the shop. I push the bike, having moved all the rear carriage stuff onto the handlebars. The tyre decides to wrap itself round the wheel. I drag the bike twenty yards before letting out an almighty bout of frustration. Well this plan won’t work. I lock the bike to a railing, remove the offending wheel and valuable stuff into a bag and carry that back up the road.

Little did I realise that I had already gone 8kms from the shop. There is no bus. I walk. The bag is heavy and too bulky. I carry it on my head. The long walk gives me time to move from angry story in my head to… It is what it is. I have a stone in my shoe which reminded me of a Zen story about a Zen master who deliberately walked everywhere with a stone in his shoe to remind him that there was always something tricky going on in life.

I’m no Zen master, but remembering that was better than winding myself up to no useful purpose. By the time I got to the shop, I was glad that he was there. He apologised humbly, gave me a real new tyre, some free patches a spare tube and took me back up to the bike and refitted it all for me. He offered to drive me to Nobeoka 20kms up the road to make up for lost time, but I refused and he understood why. It’s no good saying that I cycled from one end of Japan to the other except for 20kms in the middle where I got a free ride in a car cos my bike screwed up. That wouldn’t do.

We say goodbye again and off I go. The new tyres feel different, they are narrower than the squishy mountain bike tyres I had before, and it feels like the rims are touching the ground sometimes. They are not, but it just feels like a firmer ride. I decide to put more air in just in case. I have lost the adaptor from my pump. A little brass thing that effectively makes my pump useless without its presence, meaning that if I have a blow out miles from anywhere I am screwed. Oh crap. What to do? I will just have to find a specialist bike shop next big town up.

On I progress for half an hour, then stop at a Lawson station for food. Sitting eating a banana and chocolate spread sandwich, up rocks my man from the bike shop in his van. Out he gets, gabbling in Nihongo and holding a small brass object between thumb and forefinger.

Hooray! He is truly redeemed! I am now super pleased again. We goodbye for our third and final time (I hope), and off I go again.

Getting bored of route 10 and its endless busy traffic, I offshoot onto route 388 and instantly I am back into a quieter more sensual experience of the landscape. Soon I am on a super hairy upwardly rising slope that is a real slog, but the change is welcome.

Paddi fields, croaking frogs. Birds and a pine-scented quietness. Little villages again. Old ladies shuffling slowly. Kids on bikes. Funky houses made out of all sorts; reminds me of India. I like Japan.

Arrived near Kamiura.

Washed, used a free electric point and charged my batteries. Upped tent in the dark. Next to the sea.
April 7th Higazi, Ehime coast road. 1540 miles as crow flies distance from destination.

Nearly every day seems to have some minor hiccup with the bike. Today’s little bout of bicycle entropy entailed the front basket give up its ability to hold everything where it is supposed to be. Too much added luggage strapped onto its puny basket meant that every time I lifted up or down a curb or bump the poor thing was being strained to the point of near collapse. Today it finally went flop with its sleeping bag under carriage whirring away as it slumped onto the wheel.

All is made well again after dismantling the whole lot and concluding that what was needed was the judicious application of a goodly bracing spoon and a bespoke hand carved artisan. hunk of bamboo jammed between the newly restored basket and the fork stem so as to prevent it from wobbling up and down so much. If I can use the word bespoke in a sentence, you can bet I’m going to put artisan in with it. And whilst I’m at it, I’ll bake my own bread, grow an enormous Edwardian beard and ride a ‘fixie’. Though if you think I’m going ride single-gearedly across Japan you can go jump in the lake. (What lake?!) But then again, Japan is full of ‘mamacharis’, the single speed urban baby carriers. I’m not going to ride one of those either. Besides, I don’t own an urban baby.

I have to confess, I do find fixies very very sexy with their ultra minimalist lines. Be better though with invisible hub gears and much less snobby machismo.
Japan is the land of the rising ice cream van jingle. Just when you least expect it, up pops some bizarre twenty second tune for no apparent reason. Mostly they tend to sound like ice cream van jingles on Valium. Sometimes it’ll be a piece of piano that seems to usually sound like they’ve found a traditional Scottish folk song and then added cheesy synthesiser bits to it to nipponify it.

In Kitaura, my last sleep in northern Kyushu my early morning began with the sleepy little fishing harbour being awoken en masse at seven am by scratchy old recording of piano music fit for five year olds with some bloke talking over it in such a manner that he was clearly giving instructions for morning exercises; it was the way he would stretch out the ‘and beeeend!’ Bit of the instruction every ten seconds that gave it away. It sounded like it was recorded during the Second World War, it lasted for about twenty minutes. I didn’t see it getting anybody up and about. The streets remained stubbornly empty. Maybe Japanese people were dutifully leaping out of their beds and the exercising with gusto as they do every morning. Or maybe everyone remained dutifully and robustly fast sleep in their honorable beds.

The ultimate Japanese ice cream jingle I witnessed today on the main road up from the ferry that brought me cross to Dhushinko island where I now am. Route 197 on the sticky out peninsula running east west. Sorry I am crap at remembering names of places.

A car went past and it made a sound like it had one of those musical car horns, except that it sounded kind of farty and odd. I thought nothing of it until the car behind it played the same strangely distorted tune. That’s odd. Ten seconds later, another car goes by, and in the same place in the road, plays the same tune again.

You know how when you drift off the motorway onto the hard shoulder, there are a series of evenly spaced little bumps in the white paint that make a farty sound to warn you?

Somebody has had the genius idea of extending that idea so that your cars wheels will play a little tune on the road. Totally brilliant. If I only ever saw one thing in Japan, it would have to be this little three hundred metre stretch of road surface. Instead of bumpy paint, each note is made by lines cut into the tarmac that stretch from the centre of the road to the curbside, cut about a centimetre into the surface with a stone cutter. These lines are straight, and run parallel to each other the same distance apart for as long as the note lasts. So a block of lines that are three inches apart over a distance of ten feet will play a longer higher note than the preceding block that is six feet long with lines scored at four inches apart. I hope this makes sense, it’s quite hard to describe.

The idea is brilliant. You could have the notes marked out for ‘god save the queen’ as you drive past Windsor castle, or ‘amazing grace’ as you enter Scotland. ‘Land of my fathers’ as you drive over the Severn bridge.

Today was an easy cycling day, despite my seemingly daily dose of bike entropy. 

I had had an early finish yesterday. A deserved break for having made it the entire length of Kyushu. And I was exhausted. 

This morning I had the option of staying on the lower coastal road which would have been below the low cloud but possibly I might I’ve got lost like I did a couple of days ago. I can’t be added with getting lost. Climbing instead out of the village of Mizaki, I heave up and up and up, into the direction of route 197, the main road, and also into the low cloud.

Of course, as soon as I do that, all visibility disappears. I have a fine all encompassing view of nothing except the road twenty feet ahead. My world becomes one that is now dominated by sound.

Gratefully, the road is very easy going once I have reached the top. Actually the next twenty or so miles are all slightly downhill nearly all the way, with hardly any traffic.

This easiness of gradient is made possible by the frequent use of tunnels.

I like tunnels. I definitely have an affinity for being underground. Road tunnels are a surreal juxtaposition to the fabulous natural landscapes that they disappear into.

Each has a slightly different character. They vary from being neat and clean and light inside with nice wide cycle paths to being dank and dark with dodgy looking paving and water sliming out of the walls.

I have decided that every time I go into a tunnel, I am entering the Dr. Who zone, so much it is like being on a Dr. Who set. Even down to the obligatory panels with flashing red lights and stuff written in alien squiggles on the wall.

Going through tunnels in mist was another angle to the surrealness again.

At one point, it had got quite windy. The wind must have been blowing across one end of one of the tunnels I was in, because all the way through the tunnel I could here a sort of sub-bass humming noise; the wind was playing the tunnel like an 3normous whistle. How cool is that?!

It rained non stop for the second half of the day, and so I got very wet. I can only hope tomorrow gives me the chance to dry everything.

Oh, before I finish:

101 places not to get sand:

In the zip of your tent. Under the buttons on your phone. Under your false teeth. In your sandwiches. In the moving parts of your bike. Stuck between your toejammy toes. In your boots. Up yer bum. Okay I can’t think of another 93.

Going to sleep now, thank you.

April 10th written at Tokoshima, night before getting ferry to Honshu mainland.

Nothing of any great significance to report. In the last three days I have discovered that Japan does indeed have tractors, even if they are only little ones. Sadly, it does also have litter, usually to be found dropped down gully’s at roadsides by dimwitted hit-and-run car drivers.

Travelling across from Iyoshima on the west coast of Shikoko along the 196, after a tediously long but shallow climb up away from the coastal town, passing through a rather menacing tunnel, it then afforded me possibly the longest downhill run I have ever experienced. Following a river punctuated by small waterfalls, I must have rolled downhill aided only by gravity for about twenty minutes at least. The river then eventually joined onto a larger river at a point with a breathtakingly highly elevated road bridge spanning an equally broad and enormous valley. One end of the bridge disappeared immediately into a tunnel as soon as it reached on side of the valley. Below, spaghetti loops of highway interchange spooled around the valley floor connecting up and downstream highways with the side road I had just entered on. In the middle of all this was a tiny patch of forest where, being unspeakably exhausted, I stopped and did some well-deserved nothing. Whilst nothinging I met my very first jumping spiders. No bigger than the nail of my little finger, with two white flashes at the front end they still manage to look spectacular. Watching them scuttle about trying to have sex was interesting to watch especially as they would leap about between their scuttlings. Amazingly versatile little movers, and very engrossing entertainment for a knackered cyclist.

After a couple of hours, I rejoin the 196 and follow the river which runs directly west to east. It’s a relatively uninteresting main highway but is made easier to ride for it being a Saturday. At least I know that, as I am following the course of the river, generally my transition will always be downhill, even if only infinitesimally gradually.

Stopping at the small town of Higami halfway along the 196 I encounter another cyclist who is also considering camping in the same park I have stopped at. We chat, he is French, and two minutes later his friend also arrives. Geoffrey and Xavier have been cycling around Kyushu and Shikoko for five weeks. Now this is their last week and they heading for Kyoto, the same direction as me, before flying back to France and normal life, whatever that might be.

Its nice to have company. It’s nice to be able to talk in joined up sentences for a start, and to find our experience of Japan and the ways we handle it and its roads to be fairly similar. It’s nice to be normal, even if it’s only when I am one of three.

The next day I cycled with them. Xavier with the most streamlined and expensive and therefore tiny kit strode ahead easily whilst Geoffrey and I were slightly more bulky and slower. We found some wonderful traffic-free dyke. Top cycle paths to ride. Very similar to the Dutch Polders. Having to keep up with Xavier was a challenge; I had to keep pushing at full tilt for four hours, but we did cover 70kms in that time. Arriving at Tokoshima, we head down fiddly little back roads with a real sense of purposeful direction, afforded us by Xavier’s Garmin bike satnav. A piece of kit capable of taking us to lorry-free and therefore much more enjoyable routing.

We stop off at a Buddhist temple, number 66 on the famous trail of 88 that pilgrims in their pseudo-Morris dancer and pointy hat outfits like to follow. As my legs are about to turn to jelly, I think I will stick with just the one.

I like the temple, principally because the fabulous smell of incense makes such an incredibly refreshing change from having to smell my terminally disgusting socks. This really is not an exaggeration, I can promise you. I dread the day that somebody invites me into their home and it’s boots off time…

We wander across the seemingly never-endingly huge city and its ten million sets of annoying traffic lights, find a park and wander around in it. Geoffrey and Xavier want to climb up a hill within the park. I’ve had enough leg-pumping for one day, and opt for ice cream fuelled high quality people watching. This rather takes it out of me, so I am forced to have a second, rather good, ice cream. Bugger the expense.

There’s a gaggle of teenage girls, out in their anime outfits, some little kids watching a juggler. Three old men looking old as the hills, sitting on the grass playing go, lots of people happily sitting under the famous cherry blossom, enjoying the most sumptuous barbeque picnic. What seems to be an office works outing, all sitting en masse, kareoke-ing. It’s amazing how great you can imagine your singing talent is when you’re pissed.

To counter the three old men, another three equally ancient old ladies sit watching the spectacle about, each clutching an identical can of green tea.

Geoffrey and Xavier return, we go back to our unlocked, fully loaded bikes, left in total safety…I like Japan..

We find the ferry terminal, and because of not wanting to arrive on the other shore just as it’s getting dark, opt to call it an early day and camp up on a narrow stretch of park between a nearby road and river.

Right… Time to go and design fantasy bike-camping gear..
After a nice evening chatting with Geoffrey and Xavier, the following morning we head for the ferry. They barely speak to me during the crossing and then when we get to Wakayama on Honshu, Xavier asks me what my plans are. I get the feeling I am being hinted at that it’s time to go our separate ways. Maybe I am just looking at things through my old self worthless paranoia. I can’t tell. Anyway, I choose to not go sight seeing with them and head off down the road, feeling a bit confused and grumpy.

Eventually I find my way onto route 170, which be my only road for today and tomorrow; I found a route that cuts all the way up north to the east of Osaka, hopefully it out be too urban. The rest of the day follows a mix of town stuff and the ever present patches of allotments to keep things in balance. The road is a little hilly in places but at least I don’t need to do any navigating.

Come 5pm, I find myself an abandoned bit of road to camp on. I have an owl, a pheasant and a wood pigeon to remind me of home as the sun goes down.

April 12th. Somewhere on the southern outskirts of Osaka.

Having finally let go of the weirdness I was having about the French guys, I am feeling on the DG of feeling lonely. I sit with it, and it passes. I find lots of oranges lying discarded in a heap. Taking about twelve and having four for breakfast, I set off.

The route today turns out to be much more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

Passing through the ultra urban belt that wraps southern Honshu, I was imagining it being difficult to negotiate such a complex area.

Actually, I have stayed on the same road for fifty kilometres, pretty much in a strait line. It’s been nice and sunny all day, and either my energy level must be really good, or I had a constant wind on my back, or the road was going downhill continuously… Hardly likely to be the latter, but riding has felt pretty effortless. I think that being obliged to stop regularly at traffic lights probably helps to keep me from getting run down.

After having envied Xavier’s storage bag that fills the central triangle portion of his bike, I found today a plastic cooler bag (Walmarts!) Lying on the pavement, and in a fit of creativity spent an hour cutting it up and sewing it onto my bike frame. It works! I filled it with the extraneous oranges to test it out… It has lasted fine all day, so that’s something I am pretty pleased about.

Just before the end of the day, just as I was reaching the last part of route 170 at Hirakata I was sitting outside a family mart and met another pair of Mormons, very young guys; one from Seattle and the other from Colorado. I had a nice long chat with them about what exactly they do whilst they are on missionary service here. They teach English to anyone that wants to learn it, going walking the streets and talk to random people and offer people assistance with pretty much anything. Some days they walk around picking up litter, some days they will go and ask people if they want help with their gardening. Anything in the name of service. I like that these young guys get to go abroad and use their own initiative to find ways to help people. Brilliant! I feel rather envious of their purposeful lifestyle and their sense of companionship.

Last half hour of the day, route 170 was to become route 171 all the way into Kyoto, but I notice that as it runs parallel with a big river, I choose to follow much less busy tracks alongside the river itself. So here I am; camped up next to it. Early stop… Stopped at 5. I think I have learned from the French guys to spend a little less time in the saddle and relax a little more. Let’s see how that lasts…

April 13

Oh my word. Cycling up alongside the great wide river up to Kyoto is sublimely lovely. Astride a great long cycle path on top of a raised dyke, it is very much like riding on the Polders from Holland down to Belgium. So similar in fact, that at times the scenery could be identical; vegetable plots down in the flat spaces between neat little apartment blocks, quirky looking little houses, very casual cyclists, ole ladies on bikes, hardcore peloton wannabes slicing their way through… Barely any litter, signs of community; a group of old men playing boules on the grass down by the riverside whilst young mums play with toddlers. The ride into the city only takes a couple of hours.

Everyone I’ve met says Kyoto is the city to head for. Lots of old stuff to go see.

Following the river into the city toward the train station, I see no evidence of anything notably old. Certainly nothing any different from what I have encountered so far across the country.

What is interesting though, are the myriad narrow alleyways convoluting themselves into jammed tangles of hotch-potch housing. Old stuff, new stuff, all banged up together. 

Once at the train station, I am mildly shocked by the number of Europeans milling about the place, mostly looking like they are tourists. I have a dim hope that people will come up to me and ask how I’m doing, but of course nobody does. Strange. We’ve come all this way away from home, and somehow I vaguely expect a mutual recognition of our shared achievement. But no, men and women in couples keep themselves to themselves. Young women drag enormous suitcases awkwardly that scrunch across gravel reluctantly on inadequate wheels, looking like it’s their first time out of their home town.

Already having decided that today will be a non-cycling day, I squat down wondering what to do. It occurs to me that really I should be dealing with what happens after Japan. So far I have a plane ticket to Hong Kong, and about eight vague possibilities all of which lack any real substance in terms of a plan. It’s no good waiting til I get to Wakkanai; I need to getting something together now. It’s worrying me. So… Not really being the sightseeing type anyway, instead of seeing the no doubt wonderful and spectacular Kyoto, I head back across to McDonalds at the railway station, plug my tablet into a socket outside, and spend the Dean checking out about fifteen different air fares. I don’t know where I want to go, but at least I’ll know how much it’s going to cost me. And an I download loads of radio four podcasts for the evening company of English voices. It’s amazing how a day can disappear whilst surfing the internet. 5pm comes and it’s starting to rain. Thinking I need to get out of the city before it gets dark, suddenly life becomes very hasty. I have enough some fries from McDonalds and scatter them all over the ground by accident whilst trying to awkwardly load my bike. The paving slabs look like you could eat your dinner off them, so I do. Well… At least I picked them all up and put them back in their little red cardboard container first.

Hurrying is rarely a good mode to be in, and trying to exit the city centre it seem like everybody wants to be right in front of me and going at half my pace. By the time I get back up onto a cycle path next to the river, the rain is starting to really come down. I pass quite a nice garden type space next to the river. It occurs to me that trying to hurry out, not knowing where I am going, with no lights and I am going to be soaked by the time I get to where ever it is I imagine I am going to end up… This is just a recipe for a miserable time. This spot here looks nice and quiet. I pitch the tent, most urban stylie. I climb into it. The heavens open majorly. That was good timing. As it turns out, it proceeds to rain heavily all night long and then by morning it has had the good grace to stop. That’s my kind of rain. Convenient. Considerate.

April 14th

The sun is promising to put his hat on, hip hip hip hip hooray….

The river looks lovely this morning. Washing two pairs of sweaty underpants in the river a flock of pigeons come to see if I have any breakfast for them. A middle aged chap cycles through the middle of them and they barely seem bothered by his sudden intrusion into their space. In England they would have totally freaked out and all flown away. This, is an indication of the basic difference between the Japanese and the British. There is something about the niceties of Japanese culture, where you walk into a convenience store and they always away hello to you. You let someone else past on their bike and they give a little nod of respect. I don’t know… Maybe we Brits are just as respectful in our way.

The city is mostly tidy. It seems to lack vandalism. Their is much less graffiti than at home, and what there is isn’t the brainless ‘tagging’ scrawl that looks so bloody ugly. People plant gardens in the city, and nobody wrecks em or steals the fruits. Their seems to be more basic regard for each other.

And yes, maybe the Japanese are more conservative, more reserved and uptight. And if they are… Well I like their orderliness. I like that I never need to lock my bike. I like that I can go in a shop and not worry that some oik is going to see what he can nick out my panniers. That feels liberating, and pro-social. I feel like I’m living in a friends of the earth manifesto.

Their is no obvious straight line out of the city to where I want to get to. After one solitary wrong turn, I manage to find my way. After about ten miles of up and downy city sprawl, I eventually reach the lakeside road of route 161. The lake I must note is about fifty miles long…

The first half of the day is routine urban advertising gone madsville and shops agogo. It’s sunny and the road is marvellously flat and the going is good. After about twenty or miles of that, I get the chance to veer off the main drag onto quieter side roads running closer to the lakeside. Meandering through higgledy-piggledy old houses of the traditional type with he curly upwardly turning roof endings and lots of wooden stuff and fishing tat is very lovely. 

I stop by a lake, and it’s gorgeous. A nice break after all that busy main road. Waters lap the shingly beach edge, and a couple of old fellas do nothing but chat idly.

I grab some lunch, a hot dog in a packet. I get as far as taking one mouthful when suddenly whoosh! It’s no longer in my mouth but upside down a couple of yards away on the grass. A big sea eagle/buzzard whatever it is arcs back up into the air after having failed to properly take it from me. He is looping round, looking to see if he can take another pot-shot at my lunch. I tell him to bugger off, which he sort of does. I break the end off the hotdog bun and throw it down so he can come and get it, which he does in one swift and precise swoop. Knows what he’s doing this one. I was particularly impressed and grateful that he only grabbed the bun on his first attempt and not my hand. That would have hurt.

Excitement over for now, it occurs to me that this would be a good time to nail a plan, which I am happy to report, I have; go to Hong Kong, train across China to Mongolia, fly to turkey, cycle home. That should keep me busy until about October, presuming no cock-ups.

Happier now I have definite future direction, I go find free internet at 7/11 for the first time. This is significant, cos so far internet access has been a problem. And now for figuring out Chinese and Mongolian stuff, internet is vital, so I’m happy about that.

The 161 gets windy, and I just about get to a nice lakeside spot before it gets dark. It often seems the dusk deliberately holds back until I have got my tent up. And then it just goes black. 

Wavelets lapping, a cold rain that can’t make up its mind whether to happen or not. Drizzle-ish I suppose.

Wonky sit, write this, radio four podcast as yet unchosen. Sleep.

Tomorrow: post my passport to England.

G’night.
The next morning is blowy, lakeside waves are choppy. It’s weird to see coots apparently at the seaside, but of course they aren’t. The lake is vast and ringed across the horizon by very distant hazy mountains. Just off upshore, the local town of Imazu.

Having realised that I can get free WiFi at 7-11, I google up and work out where the post office is without having to deal with an actual person. Google tells me I need to cycle back the way I just came, take the sixth turning on the right, hang a left and there it will be. A double edged sword the ol’ interweb; robbing me of an opportunity to explore my international interaction skills, but making my life easy-peasy.

I realise I need to get some passport photos done. Google can’t tell me the answer to that one, so off I head into a vast shopping mall on the way, get lost and confused, stumble upon an information stall (not literally you understand), and do some vital personal growth by employing my international interaction skills (sketchy though they be).

At first, the tiny be-masked lady has no idea where I can get photos done. She frowns industriously for about three minutes, holds up a finger, utters something and totters off into a back office. Moments later she returns and beckons me to follow her. Silently we trace a circuitous route through the shops, down the escalator and then out the main entrance door.

Is she just trying to get of me? No; we take a sharp turn to the left and voila! A photo booth!

Origato gazaimas you lovely helpful tiny tottering bemasked lady!

Instructions available in English, an immensely courteous voice invites me to sit straight, look forwards, keep my chin up and check that my stool is the correct length.

Bing! Out pop some lovely photos.

Successfully finding the post office but earning no personal growth points, I hand over passport and photos, write a little note to the visa processing agency in London, fill in a customs address form, hand over 1500 yen about 9.50 pounds and that’s it. I’m committed now.

Wobbling off up the road I feel a strange sense of anti climax. Not in any major way, just a little, like some part of me expects something incredible and miraculous to happen when I make an actual decision. And then life carries on just the same as it was ten seconds.

Actually I also feel relieved that I now know what the next thing is. Now all I have to do is plan it and wave money at people. Easy really. I hope.

There’s an ever growing head wind, which feels a little ominous; am I about to hit standard north coast weather of unrelenting winds trying to push me backwards once I get to the north coast side?

Leaving the northern tip of Lake Riwa-ka, the headwind shows no sign of easing off. Route 161 which will take me onto the northern coast. Climbs climbs climbs ever so slightly but for about ten kilometres. Once I get to the top I seem to be at a ski resort, sans snow and therefore skiers. Workmen in the road nod respectfully at my derring-do/ridiculousness at achieving such a feat of upwardsness.

Right! What goes up, must come down! Eagerly anticipating a fabulously long descent, presumably to the coast, I start my fantastic freewheel free fall… It starts unbearably slowly, in that of way where you waggle the front wheel left and right rapidly just to keep moving. Eventually I start to head downwards despite the ever-present wind.

It would have been about 17km of freewheeling but it I just about scraped in 9.

Damn the wind. No-one should ever have to pedal downhill.

 I don’t usually measure such things, but today I thought I would, just out of curiosity to see if my estimations of distance were in any way accurate. They weren’t.

Through my first northern coastal town of Tsuruga and onto route 8.

This is my worst road so far. Unrelenting wind that has only got stronger. No cycle path. Lots of lorries whizzing past inches away from me. Regular near death experiences. Several tunnels, but not much lights at the end of them, and certainly no angels.

I push on for a few miles more, reload on chicken and rice, only 200 yen! And tuck away a few more clicks. I stop eventually on a scrap bit of land just off a t junction after a short tunnel. The road was a real cliff hugger and didn’t offer up many camping spots not unless I fancied pitching up on bumpy rocks inches from the road.

It’s a cold night, either that or I’m exhausted. I wear my extra jumper like a dhoti on my lower half: legs through where the arms should go, the rest pulled up over my waist. I could go into town wearing this. And get stared at.

Sleep well. Next morning I am welcomed/ investigated by the land owner a middle aged man. He talks to me Japanese and I talk to him in scattered lingo that basically approximates to me telling him I am heading Kagoshima to Wakkanai. he holds my bike whilst I load up, and then gives me a can of black coffee to take with me. The can claims that the coffee will be relaxing. Boy these Japs must really be strung out if coffee calms them down.

Its a gorgeous sunny day, completely wind-free. Perversely instead of making the most of it and nailing a ton of mileage, today is the day I decide to take pictures of all the kinds I of things I see every day, but have so far have gone unrecorded. It’s no good me going home and people saying what was Japan like, and me going ‘ Well… It was very Japanese.’

Well, bang go my free oranges. Seems I’m out of orange growing territory. Maybe. Perhaps people are too busy catching fish and drying seaweed to grow oranges. There’s barely any land anyway. Any village I pass through has been squeezed in onto tiny scraps of cove. It’s great. But no oranges.

The day progressed in glorious sunshine, he bike wound round the winding road. It has been a day for cruising. Lots of serious Lycra clad frogmen cyclists, most of whom like similar British cyclists are too focussed/engrossed/self-important/snobby to acknowledge scummy slowcoach me. Also out and about were many motorcyclists, several of whom ‘gave me the nod’. One bunch ‘conichi wa-ed!’ Enthusiastically. One guy chugging away comfortably on his Harley Davidson gave me a deep bow as he rode past. That made me feel quite special.

I have talked about loneliness a little bit before. It’s a strange irony that I stopped myself for years from going to far flung places because I was scared of being lonely. Certainly there have been long stretches when I have been travelling abroad in the past when I have been beleaguered by it. I have had a couple of twinges on this trip, usually when leaving people that I’ve met. Mostly I have been feeling happy, or to be more exact, feeling fulfilled. I think that loneliness is often more a matter of feeling unfulfilled than anything else. It’s our conditioning that subconsciously equates lack of fulfillment with needing someone else to magically plug the emptiness of feeling unfulfilled. Fill your life with something that enables you to feel purpose, and loneliness evaporates. It also relieves anyone else in your life of the unfair burden we put on them to somehow make you happy. That’s your job not theirs.

What’s that got to do with the price of fish? Not a lot.

Today, as well as taking half a million photos, I decided to start to broaden my food experimentation more. I bought some hard rectangular things, which I think is dried tofu. I bought some giant wotsits type things; except they are five inches long two inches in diameter and covered in slightly burnt caramelized sugar (not chocolate as in had thought).

Japan doesn’t seem to offer up nearly as many comedy wonky English adverts as India does. Though what I did see today was a sign for ‘Sakashita Motors’. Don’t think I’ll be buying my next car from them then.

At Fukai, I am officially off the page. I like to cycle off the map page that I started my morning on. This morning I was an inch from the bottom of page 62, and now I have progressed to a similar position on page 56. Wakkanai is on page 4, so I am whittling the pages away. In theory, I could just rip out the pages I no longer need and use them as toilet paper or something in order to reduce carrying weight… Nah.

One inch up page 56 on the red road route 306; just north of Fukai in real life, is series of rice paddis about thirty feet lower than the main road and completely surrounded by forest, a little hidden glen. I sat and soaked up the vibe for half an hour, then the light started to fade. Hundreds of bats appeared, swooping wildly upon unseen flying snacks and (probably) thousands of frogs start croaking like crazy. A fabulous noise. At one point a solitary duck decides to join in.

Its about five days from full moon, a good time for little critters to be thinking about getting a little jiggy. It reminds me of a time when I was visiting a new girlfriend who lived in rural south-eastern France. After a movie, we went to a forest with a lake in it, also full moon, with jiggy plans of our own. How romantic to be accompanied by so many courting frogs, that the sound was like the worlds loudest non-stop belch. She had also brought her dog with her too, and that wanted to join in what we were trying to get up to. Trying being the operative word there.

Right. Bedtime. G’night.
The frogs went wild, the wind kicked up and did its best to rearrange my tent. The rain came down and then it came down even harder. This is all very thrilling but sleep wins out. In the morning it’s still raining which makes me reluctant to rise.

Anyway, I do. Who knows how long I could wait for it to stop. Anyway, I’m English. I’m not going to let a little thing like rain get in my way.

Packed up, I’m am dressed in a drab dark Morris man get up, with grey groundsheet wrapped around my legs and all tied on with nice blue bows. I probably look wretched. Now sooner have I set off in the wind and rain than it all disintegrates, grey sheet flapping wildly. Stuff it, I’ll just have to get wet.

Just north of Fukai, out past a nice lake and through a short tunnel, maybe one hundred metres long. It must be a magic tunnel, cos on the other side it’s a nice sunny day. No mountain range in between; just a little tiny hillock. Barely a molehill. In fact I can’t think why they even bothered digging a tunnel. Must be magic.

Anyway, today… Bloody hell I might as well have been riding a motorbike the amount of pedalling I didn’t have to do. Of course, had I been going the other way, I would truly have been flogging a dead horse.

Okay, ‘nuther liddle jography lesson. The road I am following today runs just about half a mile inland from the shore, pretty much for most of the day. It runs pretty much on a northeast direction. Just off the coast on the horizon is what looks like distant mountains, but aren’t; it’s a very solid cloud front. Inland, is what appears to be a solid wall of distant snow peaked mountains again. And that is exactly what they are

Probably this cloud front is giving all the air in between a bit of a squeeze, and as it can’t get over the mountains fast enough, it’s all blowing northeast in exactly the same direction I’m heading in. That’s nice.

The wind gets stronger, and soon I am freewheeling on the flat continuously. At one point I must have been moving at about forty miles an hour. Really. I can hear the wind howling through the telephone cables, but I’m just cruising along nicely.

By the time I get to Fukai The wind has got even stronger and I nearly lose it on the bike a couple of times. Now it’s starting to become something of an effort to not crash into things. I am leaning permanently at 80 degrees to stop being blown over. Keeping a straight line is the plan, but I’m veering in all kinds of interesting and unexpected wobbly ways.

The air is full of sand blowing off the fields looking like a sand coloured smog. Gusts of sand blow out through connecting side roads. I check my route through one eye at a time, barely open so I don’t get tiny bits of field in my eye. Everyone seems to have gone inside. They’re probably peeking through their curtains going ‘who’s that bloody idiot out there on his jidensu? Must be some silly-arsed Ingerisu man.’

By the time I got out of the other side of the city, I felt battered, but not in a fish and chips kind of way, cos that would make no sense. I sat outside a shop, got my wits together, had some nice hot noodles, and then wend my way onwards to where I am camped now, in a little scrap of forest. The weather has calmed down, and tomorrow starts with what I hope will be a nice gentle downwards riverside run down to the coast again.

Bon soir. Conbanwa. G’night.
April 18th.

Having just camped out in forest directly over a road tunnel, and my destination being the coast again, I can reasonably safely predict a downhill kind of day, which is how it turns out, at least the first bit. It’s nice to start easy .

After a couple of user friendly tunnels, i.e. reasonably wide cycle paths and reasonably well lit and a simple run downhill for about six miles I reach the flatlands again. At the outskirts of Fukai city, an out of town shopping mall with a miniature London eye style ferris wheel. Not really what I expected to see.

I find a dyke route along Fukai’s main river, a bumpy rattly stone track rather than tarmac, but it’s doable. Pheasants. By the riverside. All the very many pheasants I have ever encountered in my life (I grew up on an aristocratic private estate) have been put there specifically to be shot at, effectively living their little short not-very-smart lives in an open prison. It’s very odd to find freewheeling pheasants wandering around not in countryside but in the middle of semi industrial suburbs. 

Taking lots of photographs has an interesting effect on my mind. Everything becomes fascinating. All sorts of ordinary things suddenly become suffused with possibilities. A rusting factory unit becomes a dance of rectangular forms and hues. Concrete drains arc and curve like details in the plans for space age aircraft. Juxtaposed objects in a scene bounce stories off each other: an old lady bent over tending onions in her vegetable patch, a hodge-podge of green uprights. Beyond her, a small forest of gravestone pillars…. A yard full of gravel sitting in heaps mimics almost exactly in parallel the skyline of majestic Japanese Alps way off in the distance. 

The river broadens enormously. Each bridge I pass by is painted a different colour so locals will never be confused about where on the river they are. 

Now I am in a vast industrial area. Grey and dusty, stretching on for miles. Fukai clearly is a very big place. It feels like Sunday, the roads seem quiet, but when I check, it’s actually Monday. Smells of melting plastic… Fish being canned… Curry. Smells like dinner. The smell of diesel and iron, which I am surprised to find, reminds me of the delicious differentness of working; of having structure, purpose and banter over cups of tea in break times. After so much of rural and semi rural Japan, it’s interesting to see Japan at work, making stuff.

The industrial west becomes an unexpected cycle path that steers me through suburban Holland. Well it could be, except Holland isn’t lined with cherry trees. Away from the main road I am blanketed in a route I don’t have to think about having to negotiate. Before I know it, I seem to be somewhere utterly different. Nothing but cute little houses, quite modern in style suitable for a seaside town. The industry has gone. Today is a day of distinct contrasts.

I camp by the sea, in a stand of wobbly unregulated cedars. They look much nicer with a bit of bend in them. Another also unregulated pheasant. By the sea! Who would have heard of such a thing! Okay, calm down, it’s only a pheasant.

April 19th. Kurobe.

A gentle breeze blows me up coast. On my left, the sea. On my right, the abruptly ending edge of the Japanese Alps . Between, a variety of meandering roads and a railway across a width of about two miles on average. Who needs a map? Not me. Not today anyway.

This is all very nice and easy. It can’t last of course; life’s not like that. Sure enough, the two mile spread becomes an almost impossible squeeze as the Alps decide that they are going to kiss the ocean. What now ensues is several miles of unicycle paved tunnel (well half tunnel; the sort that you can still see out of the side of between the endless concrete pillars). At least it’s not dark. There are roadworks halfway along inside, and because of this, the workmen at the entrance to the tunnel hold up the traffic whilst I cycle through it alone without the harassment of thundering lorries.

This tunnel is less Dr. Who and more James Bond in Soviet-era Russia, but no exploding helicopters I am glad to report.

At the end of the tunnel, a stop-and-rest spot with noticeboards informing me of how this bit of coast has been almost impossible to traverse, and that people used to get washed away by the sea regularly trying to get up along here. Now they tell me.

Ahead of me, the Hokuriku expressway (a motorway I can’t and wouldn’t want to go on) appears out the side of a mountain and stretches out high over the sea in great wide arc before curling back in and landing on the coast again at ground level. Following its trajectory is like watching an airplane land. Except it’s a bridge.

Some more coast, some lunch at a 7-11. Rice and curried veg out of a packet. Fuel up the computer and phone. Heading out of town, the mountains are calling me. But I’m going up the coast! I protest. Yeah, but there’s always more coast, the mountains call back. You couldn’t go back to England and have to endure people scoffing at you because you never cycled in the Japanese Alps could you?

Yeah, but they’re all climby and it’s probably freezing up there and they’ll be no shops and anyway the mountains look pretty stunning from down here where I don’t have to make any effort.

Wimp. The mountains seem to say.

Oh alright you buggers. You’ve messed up my routine now.

I have ominous omens about all this. Whatever happened to me getting 50kms a day closer to Wakkanai for a start? This is all a bit sideways.

This, it transpires is the least of my worries. My tunnelling experiences having migrated from Dr. Who to Sean Connery-era James Bond, now I descend into ten miles of Stephen king in concrete.

Tunnel number one up route 148 is only half a mile long, but has a path 26 inches wide with a curb 12 inches high. Very many lorries roar through in a kind of virtually non-stop kind of way.

I reach the other end, successfully having not being turned into bicycle-entangled mince.

Two miles down the road another tunnel. There is an ambiguously over grown pathway to the right that may or may not be the route intended for cyclists. It looks like nobodies been down here for a long time. Well it’s got to be better than the horrible tunnel. 

The path becomes increasing overgrown to the point where a sodding great tree has completely blocked my way, and there is nothing looks like there might be tarmac underneath it anyway. To my right is a rough-looking track that drops down alongside the river.

In my world, there ain’t no turning back, so it’s down onto the rough track. Way ahead I can see cars coming out the other end of the tunnel. There is a construction yard there too, with a road dropping to the river. I just need to hope that what’s in between doesn’t involve unseeable uncrossable river or thorns or both.

Up on the road again (clearly the last bit worked okay after all) I work my way up the mightily impressive mountain valley, heedless of the ongoing traffic. Okay, maybe those mountains did have a point.

Philosophising over again as I encounter another tunnel. This one tells me that it is two tunnels each so important as to have individual names (Geoff, and Colin. But in Japanese). One, so it says, is 188m long. OK. The other is 5.78km long. Oh.

None of this information seems to have any bearing on reality. There is only one tunnel. They must have tunnelled up the gaps since putting that sign up. And I don’t know how long it is, but it seems to go on forever. More non-stop thundering lorries. A path edge 26 inches wide. Most of the time. This isn’t Stephen King this one. It’s like the kind of film that I completely totally fail to comprehend why anyone would either make or go and watch. Bring back the Dr. Who type tunnels please and I promise to be good.

This great vast stretch of half covered tunnel has occasional breakout gaps where I can let loose any sense of claustrophobia and get to see where I actually am. In the greatest of contrasts, a great green glacial river runs below, cedar forest rises heavenwards. And you don’t see any of it whilst in the tunnel. Obviously.

Finally, eventually and most essentially before it gets dark (I have no lights) I am out of the tunnel. It’s 5.45pm.

 I have surfaced at a charming little village called Otari, but my destination for today lays way above me, up a series of hairpin bends I can just about make out. Okay. Here we go.

I have never really liked mountain bikes. I find them to be ugly lumpy thick things with stuff on them that really should only be on a motorbike suspension. I much prefer the leanness of form of a bike with nice bit of skinny Reynolds tubing.

I have a mountain bike. These, most definitely, are mountains.

No silly springs on this bike, but it WAS super light before I loaded all my crap, sorry, vital equipment onto it. What it also has is splendidly low range gears, which effectively means that I can, with confidence, head up that ridiculously steep and tall mountain on this ridiculously loaded bike. In very bottomest gear. Casually, knees working away sort of happily but certainly without any significant protest, I. Can. Get. Up. This. Mountain.

My knees are pumping away and I’m moving at slightly faster than walking pace.

The air is getting much cooler. It’s heading to evening as I head upwards. The air will be thinning a little probably. It’s going to be bloody cold when I’m done and I don’t suppose I’ll get much sleep by the time I stop.

I pass one little village. The road starts to turn into crumbly concrete. Check GPS. Yes this is the right way. Traffic noise gives way to river white noise bouncing off the valley sides. Cedars grow thick and solid. Brooks babble. I pass a pile of still unthawed gritty roadside snow. An Outwards Bounds centre. Two guys in red jogging downhill. Conichiwa!

I find a tiny cwm with a water running through it. A flat spot to wash and camp. Just before it goes twilight I get the tent up. I am fast asleep before I can think to do anything. I don’t even undress. I stink. It’s been a long day.

April 20

Wow what a good sleep!

Its the first time in a long time when it’s just been me and a forest. No car noise, no people, no buildings. Just whatever is around crunching through the fallen branches. Little sounds, little movements. Something shifts in me in these moments. I get reminded that there’s this whole other level of existence out there, quietly minding its own fabulous business, being warmly calm, fully alive and zinging in its own nothing-to-do-ness. I forget. Put all those ‘missions’ down and just let go will ya? 

I doze awhile, cos it’s nice to.

Eventually, I submit to habit; I kind of have to. If I just stay here I’ll run out of food.

Up tent, oil bike chain and off I go, up mountain track. Road shut. Chap tells me road shut because of snow. Hmm.

I climb over the barrier; not easy with a tonnage of bike. I bash my hand in the process. It hurts. I jabbed myself in the eye a couple of minutes ago whilst uptenting. Somebody trying to tell me something?

Up the track a little, a waterfall. I strip slightly and wash. I’m not feeling very comfortable about this mountain mission. I don’t have a whole lot of food with me, and I have screwed up in mountains before. It might be nice and sunny now, but what if I get hemmed in by shit weather and I’ve eaten all my food? I’d be liable to make stupid choices most likely.

Just as soon as my dangly bits are properly back in my trousers, no fewer than seven cars come streaming through the ‘this road is extremely closed’ gate.

Well that’s a bit odd. Maybe I won’t feel so bad about disobeying the rules then.

Chugging slowly upwards, winding through increasingly spectacular forested mountains I happen upon the persons who had just gone past in the cars. They are local conservationists making sure a rare butterfly is doing okay, and that the dodgy tourist isn’t trying to steal it. I’m not. Not much meat on a butterfly.

One of their number speaks very good English and informs me that the lake I am after is ten kms away and probably I might be able to get to it okay.

This is a great relief to get his blessing so to speak and also nice to have a little chat.

Further up, I see a fox with a stripe up his back. He runs off of course. I wasn’t part of his morning itinery.

Snow starts to appear in little unmelted roadside piles. I go round them. Easy.

Further up the way, the piles get bigger until they are all across the road. I scrunch my way across them. Fairly easy.

Even further up, the snow is be coming more frequent. The piles higher and longer. I scrabble across a few. It’s exhausting. After the third such pile I check my GPS. I’ve got miles of this to go. More than ten kms I reckon. I don’t have enough food. Okay. No sense in tempting something dangerous, just cos I wanted to see a lake.

I saw the mountains; the mountains saw me. All’s square.

I savour my little moment by some lovely old pines by seeing if snow plus chocolate spread makes decent ice cream. It does! Well that’s a lunch of sorts. I know it’s not proper food but it will see me back down the hill.

My downward return might feel like an anticlimax, but I get to do something almost like actual mountain biking, haring along, not overshooting off cliff sides whilst I’m at it. The conservationists have gone, and what took me three hours going up, takes roughly ten minutes. I am back down at the horror movie tunnel in twenty.

Right. Tunnel. Tunnels. I know what’s coming. I know how long it goes on for. 

Curiously, the tunnels have less traffic in them than yesterday. I manage to get my eagle eye in, and end up fairly whipping along down my two foot wide extra raised pavement. Slightly dangerous, but I want to get this over with, and I do have gravity on my side. Seven kms long this one tunnel, I checked.

Another twenty minutes later and I am through all the tunnels. I almost enjoyed it. 

Back down along some proper proper cycle path and soon enough I am back where I started before I started this non-starter of a mountain mission. I hope I don’t encounter any more tunnels like those. I probably will. Ho hum.
The route alongside but not on the main road is filled with endless little cedar box houses some with the famous eastern curly tiled roofs, some not. Little garden plots everywhere. Onions are in and not much else. Probably lots of little seeds sprouting under the ground round about now I would think.

No need for a map which is nice, gives an extra sense of freedom. I stop for a little lunch, sprawled on the grass. Revelling in a childhood memory of going to the shops with our dog Sheba to get the evening post and some baccy for my mum….

A nice little bit of memory sidewaysness.

Specks of rain punctuate the sunshine. Becomes more specks. Time to get going.

The specks become the persistence (as in ‘totally persisting it down’}, then becomes the predominant feature of the rest of the afternoon. The interesting extended village ends, becomes a noisy main road with a bumpy cycle path. Trucks whizz past, spray everywhere. Best way to deal with it is to just plug on through some miles.

Eventually I get to Kashiwazaki. At 7-11 I need hot noodles. Sitting inside, I drip. Bedraggled . I want chocolate. Three bags of choccy things and that’s my comfort sorted as best I can manage under the circumstances. Was going to go on further, but… I’ve had enough.

I find a spot near a harbour pretty much straight away, which is good as I’m not in the mood for farting about.

Tent up in the relentless rain, I am obliged to go through a careful process whereby I end up in my tent dry wearing new dry clothes whilst everything wet stays out of the tent. It requires that I do everything in the right order. Get it wrong and I’m in for a sleepless wet night. Ten minutes later I am lying down feeling cosy and dry. Very important for the sanity. Hopefully tomorrow will be dry, then all this wet stuff can get dried.
Next morning it’s still drizzling.

In order to still have dry clothes to keep me warm in the evening, I am obliged to wear the wet gear I was wearing yesterday, excepting new dry underpants and fresh socks! Putting on the wet socks and pants from yesterday would mean ending up with footrot and painful rashes. And also being unbearably smelly.

 The drizzle persists all morning, I follow a straight road, the 116 that goes on and on and on. Currently I am preoccupied with the ins and outs of visa processing and trying to make up my mind about how to go about getting back west. Do I go to China, Vladivostok or just fly to Mongolia? Am I choosing these places because I really want to go to them or just so I can tick a box and brag to people about it afterwards?

The landscape through the rain offers nothing more engaging than the worrying I am subjecting myself to. Now I remember why I like long distance cycling so much; there’s (usually) nothing to figure out or deal with. Making choices and decisions is the two things in life I am worst at. This visa stuff is doing my head in.

I know, that soon enough my current mental fug will pass, and that I will be sitting excitedly on some form of transport venturing into another new and exciting culture. I’m just not at that bit now. All I can do is notice the kind of tangle I am getting in, and do my best to be rational and objective about it.

The rain stops, the sun comes out. This is no reflection on my mental state in the slightest, but it does mean I can start to dry out as I’m going along. The 116 heads into Niigata I wander across its largeness out the other side and find an nice huge river to camp next to.

April 23rd.

I wake up. The sun is shining. I do nothing. Oh the bliss. This is the first day since I have been in Japan that I have actually properly rested. No wonder I’ve been knackered.

Eventually started getting to grips with return route to Europe. Once adequately rested, started researching it a bit. Red tape and hoop-jumping extravaganza! Hooray! 

Got as far as the nearest food shop half a mile away only because I had eaten everything I had, and recamped on the opposite side of the river afterwards.
April 24

A days worth of dozing, gazing at the huge river. Trying to plan further travel and its attendant red tape and hoop jumping; trying to anticipate when I would be wanting to arrive and leave each country, which all hangs on whether I get offered a visa for the country preceding it. Tricky, and I don’t know how to do that. Trying to make sense of what in a really free world would be a natural and easily flowing thing. Sporadically abandon trying. Read half of ‘One Straw Revolution’ by Manusoba Fukuoka. A faintly ranty but very interesting agricultural research scientist who spent years perfecting the art of abandoning the ‘doing’ part of agriculture in order to arrive at something more natural that does it’s own doing with minimal human interference.

Email Visa Machine, an agency in London, and tell them of my revised and complicated ambition to travel overland through about ten countries, some requiring bending-over-backwards degrees of form filling. Faceless people demanding to know where I will be and when in several months time and then wanting me to prove it. I couldn’t say with any accuracy where I m going to be next week. And really, genuinely; who actually gives a shit?

 With the help of the visa processing experts things will be easier I hope.

Enough of that for now. I set off down the road, finally, in the afternoon. There’s a headwind. I’m cold. The furious push-push of previous days has vapourised. Either I get a long way up the coast or I don’t.

In some ways, the sense of place is an illusion. I sit now at the end of the day in a forest. The wind blows through the tree-tops. Crows call out as they head for their twilight roost. Distant traffic sounds intermittently break through the solitary gush between the trees and me. This tree-wind sound feels like the only time my real name is ever pronounced correctly.

Eyes shut, I could be in Savernake forest in West Berkshire. Or the walking area at Dhamma Dipa near Hereford, the meditation centre I have spent some revelatory time at. It could be the wood behind my friend Helen’s house. The unnamed ocean-sized expanse of forest barely north of the arctic circle one mile on the Finnish side of the border with Russia where I once spent summer solstice with some lovely Finns (it snowed). Inner Labrador. Glen Mazeran just south of Inverness where in the summers of my teenage I would wander aimless and alone in the pines and playing pooh sticks in the burn.

It will no doubt be the sound of the Siberian forest should I ever get to hear it.

At perhaps the times when I would most rather be elsewhere, my mind reinterprets my surroundings. Riding on a bus through Belize in Central America and urgently in need of English conversation, the fields that rolled by outside my window were flat and hedged with tall spindly trees… Through a squinted eye, I rather fancied at that moment I was in Thetford in Norfolk; a very similar landscape that was once close to home.

Cycling from john o groats to lands end in 1993, and at a time when I had no money at all, the sun came pouring in down into an unexpectedly glorious tree-filled valley around Exmoor. For the next half hour I told myself that I was actually in Argentina. I have never seen Argentina to demonstrate otherwise, so it was easy to convince myself that I was now on a free super-exotic holiday.

Where we are is more about how we engage than anything else.

Conversely, my favourite view is of the skyline from any part of the British island landscape. Its shape in any particular place tells me of how our island was formed; of ancient ancient volcanoes, super-heated rock being rolled and tumbled like toffee under forces I can’t even dream of. Sea-beds surge up out of the water, lifting the calcified remains of unknown trillions of tiny sea creatures up into the air to become the southern chalk downlands. And then millions of years later being scrubbed and flattened by ice a mile thick. And this is where I was born. In one sense, we do most definitely stand on the shoulders of giants.

How the eastern flat fens begins to undulate outwards, north west and south. Heading west it becomes the gentle swell of prairie farmland Cambridgeshire. It swells further as you move into Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Wiltshire, a landscape worshipped most visibly by ancients, perhaps because of its most peculiarly shaped hillsides, as if turned by some giant hand. Further west, hills rise ever skyward, valleys delve ever further. Each place just a little different from the place next to it, until the Fens have somehow become the great glens of Scotland. In that way, the British landscape may be read like a poem to its own ever-morphing continuity. Having some familiarity with British places, just given the view of the local style of building set in any given landscape, there’s a fair chance you may be able to identify your location without the need for names.

The Lonely Planet guide books would have me chasing after the spectacular. After castles and huge mountains. The oldest this, the biggest that. The most-est something or other. All of them very amazing and exciting and I really should go and see them. Endless crumbling Japanese sheds and allotment plots hold infinitely more fascination for me than any museum or cultural spectacle. 

My plan to travel overland back to Europe is mere skimming. The faster I go, the less I see. I strongly suspect that I might see more on a mile long walk through any county at home than by sitting in fifty buses rattling through thousands of miles of foreign lands. So why go? Maybe I m just closing a circle that’s been left open for all my life. And anyway, it’s going to take me months rather than days.

Something about the steppe country calls me though. Lands so vast that they possibly have more in common with a sense of a spiritual infinite than anything else I went to Labrador in 2002 and I travelled in someone’s car and saw no sign of mans existence apart from the road we were on. For five hundred miles. I was surprised how mildly disconcerting it felt, that it was possible to disappear so far away from the rest of humanity. It might have been like drifting in space. Certainly as dangerous if the car had broken down, and I had no known way of getting back.

So how do people live out there in these vast oceans of grassland that I imagine sing the songs of endless blades of wavering grass? Maybe I will get to feel it. Maybe it will get left in my imagination. Maybe, maybe…

April 25th. Arakawa.

I have a continuing urge not to push too much. The cedar forest is gorgeous, quiet and compelling. It is its own complete world. I could just stay here forever and never ‘do’ anything ever again.

I leave, of course. Cycling off down a forest track without any great certainty of where I might be heading. It’s tarmac; so out, eventually would be my educated guess.

There’s a low level headwind all day long, which initially I find tedious. There’s nothing to be gained in finding something tedious, so I decide to just accept it and not expect to get very far very quickly. The coast is quintessentially Japanese; lots of tall pointy tiny islands just offshore with bonsai trees perched on top. Very nice.

Some way on, I stop at ‘Salt and Cafe’ which does exactly what it says on the tin. Inside the man running the shop seeing my mission-laden bike gives me two boiled eggs and a bag of his home produced salt. Half the shop is taken up by an eight foot long vat of boiling sea water.

He also sells fantastic vanilla ice cream. The other half of his shop is not filled by a vanilla pod munching cow.

The winds still up, so I stop early. I started late too. Today is a can’t-be-arsed day, and that’s okay.

Today I saw a young woman standing next to her yellow bodied white fairinged Honda C90 Supercub. The rear rack was laden with camping gear. She had long hair blowing all around her, so I never saw her face. I fell in love with her just on principle, for about three minutes. As I cycled off ahead of where she had stopped, it was about ten minutes later that she came zimming past me. And zimming is what Honda C90s do. No roaring or claiming to own the road, just meekly zimming along. As in zimmer frames perhaps. Or even Robert Zimmerman maybe. She was clearly going to get there long before I was anyway; wherever that might have been. The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind… Zzzziiimmmmmm……

April 26th.

After eating completely gakky food yesterday and feeling like a craphead for it, I awoke with a renewed sense of getting my poo poo together.

I ate fresh green leaves for breakfast. I followed that by successfully turning a PDF format visa application form into jpegs, getting the memory card out of my kindle, plugging it into a machine that mostly only spoke to me in Japanese, printed the form (my first attempt turned my application form into glossy photos. Don’t think I can send those to the Mongolian embassy). Filled the form in and then posted it. It was more complicated than that. Sitting outside trying to get my kindle to connect to the WiFi was a repetitious exercise in ‘computer says no’. All together it took me three and a half hours to fill in a two page form. But at least I could do it all from right where I was, which is incredible really; not having to buy a train ticket to probably Tokyo and waste loads of time and money just to fill in a form..)

 It was an exercise that in the not too distant past would have reduced me to a tearful quivering wreck. But today… I kept my cool. I rock. Hurrah!

Today I had hot potato wedges and herring in breadcrumbs for tea. I miss English squidgy stodgy chips!!!! And gravy!!!! Ohhhh!!!!

Okay enough of that.

April 27th. Yunohama, near Tsuruoka.

Headwinds. Non-stop rain. A long straight lorry filled noisy uninteresting road. Me completely soaked needing to very carefully transit to bed at the end. That’s all you need to know about today. 

Oh, and the biggest penis I have ever seen in my life.

In a tiny cove, a cluster of ramshackle fisherman’s homes. And a massive cock, carved from a tree trunk. Suspended in a wooden frame, it even has gonads, made from buoys in nets. Twelve feet long, the same size as a male Blur whales old chap; the largest in the world, you’ll be relieved to learn. Maybe this fantastic dildo is here as bait, to lure some horny sex-starved lady-whale out of the water to leave her stranded so that she might become dinner for the village for the next five years. What else could anyone possibly do with such an impressive bobby-dangler? Dance around it like it’s the village Maypole perhaps. I could wait another few days and find out maybe. Naaah. ‘S too wet n ‘horrible.

I recently discovered that a flea has a willy twenty times bigger than its own body. Now, if you were to mate a flea with a whale, would you end up with a whale with a donger almost as big as Japan? I think it’s likely.

April 28th. Just north of Yuza.

Camped in a scrap of pine-topped dune. I’m out of the wind mostly. In the morning, I am obliged to wear the wet gear of the day before. Going and standing out of the trees towards to sea, a full-on wind is blowing. I stand in it arms stretched out, in order to evaporate as much of the wetness as possible. The thin trousers dry reasonably quickly, the jumper not so. I feel my stomach tensing. Letting it relax a little, I make a mental note not to push today. Wet weather is exhausting, mentally mostly.

I am camped next to what amounts to being a service station. No Burger King infested mall this; only homemade, hand produced fare. I run my frozen hands under warm water in the toilet sink which makes them hurt. It was only warm water too. Eventually I am washed. In the mirror I can see what a wreck I look… Wind and rain. It erodes people. Maybe that’s why humanity invented office jobs. My skin has gone brown. Oh that’s sun tan. A difficult concept to muster right this very minute.

There is a room for passing motorists to relax in. A TV in the corner, nice wooden tables with benches all made of reassuringly solid not going anywhere in a hurry tree trunks. A huge window with the sea a hundred metres away thrashing wildly but silently.

I sit in a numbed fug and drip. I’m not doing anything until I feel like it. I mix up some cold soup and rice for breakfast. Not exactly thrilling so I go buy some nice sweet crunchy biscuits. Much better. Right now, comfort is everything.

The rain has stopped. My mind reconnects, eventually. I set out laundered underpants and socks hanging on the front basket to dry in the wind. No sooner have I done that than the first few splats of rain begin to return. Okay, so it’s going to be like that is it? Stash my washing in a plastic bag, and head off. A black plastic groundsheet for an over-skirt, when I stop at shops I look like a cross between Neo the main character from The Matrix, and a fishmonger.

The rain stops by the afternoon, but the wind is still there. At times I am barely moving very much quicker than walking pace, but that’s only occasionally.

On the map, an unusual looking part of the map shows a massive roughly circular area with a neat grid of roads crisscrossing it. What is it? An airport? A military base? Nuclear power station? After getting bored of the busy route7, I head down a coastwards side road that leads me through a broad area of cherry orchards, which is very pretty, and more importantly a lovely wind buffer. About to leave area northwards, I encounter the strange looking area on the map. It’s a massive expanse of dead flat bare dirt fields. Japanese Fenland.

Its near to shutting up shop time, it’s raw wind beyond and I’m buggered if I’m going to try and camp in the middle of that. If it rains I’d be completely knackered.

I do something I very very rarely do: I went back. Turning round and retreating into the cherry orchards, I find a potential spot I had noted on my way through. I find a flat area with sparse young pines, next to a raised bank to keep the wind off. Perfect.

April 29th. Inland from Tenno, just south of Ogata-Mura.

In the morning the sun is shining. It’s warm. I was starting to wonder if this far north was actually capable of friendly weather this time of year. Thankfully it is.

Skylarks are twittering like mad, apart from that, it’s peaceful. No wind battering, no rain, no relentless car noise not even the white noise of the sea.

Dead reed stalks make crackling sounds as they dry in the warmth.

What a lovely morning. Perfect cycling weather. I think I’ll stay here.

I doze, I sit, I read (Terry Pratchett’s “Pyramids” and Josie Dew’s “Ride In The Neon Sun”- a re-read of the book that first turned me on to the notion of cycling through Japan). I find water and have a beautiful day. I am about two thirds to the top of Japan. I have lots of time, so I might as well stop and relax a bit more. Hmmmmmmm…………!

Sunday May 1st. 

The day after April 29th. I am sure April has more days than that?! I must have lost a day somewhere. I wonder where I put it?

It seems like it’s another day for not going anywhere in. I had a day and a half of not cycling last week, and I have been pushing the pedals solidly for exactly a month, so a bit more relaxing is fine I think. Gives me chance actually to jot down some bits that I have otherwise forgot to put in:

Four days ago, I bought some beans. They were cheap. They were also rotting. Not fermented, not pickled; rotting. They smelled somewhere between my socks on a bad day and an old dogs bottom. They were covered in slime. I momentarily considered taking them to the counter and complaining that I had been sold duff produce, but quickly realised that this goo was probably meant to be like this. I left the other two cartons for someone else to find and enjoy….. Oooh! Look! Slimy stinky dogbum rotbeans! What luck! I’ll take ’em home and have stinky slimy dogrot bumbeans on toast!

They probably enable you to live to a million or something. Scares all the other internal bacteria away.
I do love my 7-11/ Lawson Station/ Family Mart convenience store and internet nipple.

I get free electric recharging, WiFi, a toilet, a wash, access to chocolate, bread, bananas, rice, miso, a thousand miles of noodles, the occasional hot bread-crumbed bit of chicken. Stinky slimy dogrot bumbeans.

What I like best though, is walking into the shop weather-beaten and rain battered, getting a warm cheery ‘Ohayo gazaimzas!’ Which usually comes out as : ‘Hiozaimaaaaaaaaaaas!’ because I am the fifteen millionth person that they have said it to this week. What I also very much enjoy, perhaps somewhat perversely, is the shamelessly musically-destroyed pop muzak that they all have in-store:

”It’s Not Unusual – not Tom Jones; ‘Day Dream Believer’ not by whoever did the original. Most thrilling of all: a truly truly hideous synthesiser instrumental version of Michael Jacksons ‘Thriller’. Absolutely godawful. I love it. Best of all though, and it’s a piece of music close to my heart (genuinely!), is a bollocksed-up version of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Ghastly. Sorry; Astley.

I never liked the song. It’s vacuous, unbearably bouncy and nerve wreckingly cheerful. One day somewhere tropical I made the mistake of going wwoofing at a nasty cruel misogynistic American chaps place. After three days I escaped down the hill feeling like a total victim. I jumped on the first bus that came past hoping he wouldn’t find me first. A song ended on the buses radio, and the next one on was ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. I’ve loved it ever since.

Lots of very battered, derelict looking seaside towns up the coast recently. Presumably many are hotelling pipe-dreams intended to service the thronging holiday masses eager to escape the vast urban belt of southern Honshu… Except that the Japanese are allowed almost no holiday in the year. 

Ruined seaside towns. I wonder if they happen everywhere? Maybe it’s to do with Tsunamis or the threat of them as well? Certainly there are an awful lot of signs telling people where they should run like the clappers to in the event of a sudden hundred metre high wall of death.

One stretch I passed through a few days ago had erected wooden palings around all its homes. It made the whole place look like a Viking stockade. Certainly no defence against a tsunami, but I suppose whenever the sea is being a bit averagely rotten, it stops you ending up with fifty gallons of sea water and broken glass in your lap when your trying to sit down and eat a TV dinner in front of coronation street.(very popular in Japan. Coronation Street, I mean.

Another non-sequitur:

Why do so many Japanese seem to have some sort of health problems with their legs? I think it may something to do with having to wear slippers so often, that it ends up making people shuffle about everywhere. You think I’m making some silly joke? Come to Japan and you’ll see what I mean. It has the unfortunate effect of making it look like the person hasn’t quite managed to get to the toilet on time.

I see many very old women; out of the corner my eye usually. Japanese people are naturally quite short, old women even more so. And then, almost certainly from having spent a very considerable chunk of their lives standing in wet paddies bent double planting or weeding rice, they end up stuck like that. Walking around at ninety degrees must hurt.

I also notice a lot of people over sixty have really bowed legs, which I suspect is a testament to how much tougher times must have been during and after the second world war. It’s rickets causes bowed legs? What causes rickets?

May 2nd. Just north of Hachimori.

It’s a bank holiday in England so I have a fine excuse to have an easy day, not that I need an excuse of course.

Waking up, my camp spot with an ample quantity of dead grass, has a certain warm smell in the dew that reminds me of being a kid and messing about in haystacks on the village farm near where I lived as a teenager.

Saying a grateful goodbye to my little two day nest, I set off in a more or less northerly direction, out of the nearby  village, across some ultra flat farmland, through a scrap of town and up the main road route 42 having successfully not found anywhere that’s going to sell me some breakfast. I could cycle all day and fast I suppose? That would lose me a bit of unnecessary flab.

Sunny day, no wind. I like. The road is dead straight. It passes a huge lake with a series of sluice gates at one end, looking very Dutch or German perhaps.

Wondering what I am going to have for breakfast and fantasising of an enormous bowl of very milky cornflakes.. granola…. a white bread cheese and tomato sandwich…. Chapattis, Shimla-style….

The need to find a shop disappears when I find an unopened bag of plain crisps on the verge next to the road. Very tasty. Hang on, there’s another packet on the other side of the road. That’s handy. Scoffing both packets I set off again. Two minutes later, another packet…then another, then another… What’s this all about then? Each identical packet has some sort of sleeve glued to it, each of which he been opened. Further scrutiny reveals that the crisp packets have some sort of offer on American baseball jackets… Collect ten tokens and get a Dallas Eagles jacket for only five million yen or something. So some kid has clearly bought loads of crisps, ripped the tokens off and chucked the unwanted crisps out the window. Thanks for breakfast!
Two miles later, I pull into a car park and eat my seventh and final bag of crisps. Ooh! There’s a farmers market! I almost ignore it and cycle on, but… I’m a vegetable enthusiast, I did used to work in a British farmers market, so I should go and at least have a little look.

Its very busy and I have breakfast again. And then once more just in case. I have what seems to be rice pudding ice cream. It’s very very excellent indeed. I hereby instruct you to go make rice pudding, stick it through a blender and then freeze it. Very worthwhile.

Slap bang next to the farmers market is another building which I presume to be a continuation of the farmers market, which in a funny sort of way, it is. Inside it’s quiet. Oh. Then a series of photos on the wall. It’s not an art gallery but a series of very interesting photos which, when the penny drops, I realise is a photographic history of the transition of this area from a marshland fishing area to a massive area of reclaimed land. From a father and son sitting horseback wading through the lake, to ice hole fishing. Then a big steel pipe is introduced, the water drawn off, channels dug, machinery, people, mud, mess and then (this is 1962-65) families unloading suitcases from a wagon, children running and skipping. A photo of a great official unveiling ceremony. The era the photos were taken lends everything a very soviet looking propaganda feel. Lots of men wearing the big baggy suits and Homberg hats of the time. A series of seven enlarged photo portraits of the men who were in charge of the project in the museum; one being Pieter Phillipe Janson. Dutch? Flemish? Dunno. American even? Could be. My guess is that he’s a Dutchman. In one of the photos he is shown as being about two feet taller than his executive mates. The Dutch are a tall lot.

It was Dutch water engineers who oversaw the draining of the fens, bringing with them a legacy of very many Dutch-style houses in the east Anglia and Cambridgeshire area. I wonder if I’ll see any Dutch houses further up the road?

No more Dutch houses, but it’s a lovely ride north non-the-less. Music from my phone in my ears for the first time in a very long time. Garlands by Cocteau Twins, Rubycon by Tangerine Dream, Goldie Looking Chain’s Greatest Hits, Hagnesta Hill by Kent (Swedish Arctic Monkeys). Digging out stuff I rarely listen to. Will delete most of it now I think. Tangerine Dream and Kent too heavy-going…
It even feels like the winds behind me ever so slightly.

Just before camp time a sign warning me of monkeys. But when I find a nice spot further up, I spend the evening with a brown shield bug, an earwig and a giant sand flea all hanging out with me. Which is nice, but I can’t help thinking that they only want me for my torchlight.

Its warm!

Somewhere before Ajigasawa.

In the morning, the sound of several approaching voices rises me earlier than my eyelids would have preferred. They pass me by, but that’s it, I’m awake now. Hello treetops! Hello dozey me!

I am camped in a lovely sweet slightly garlicky patch of dense cow parsley.. I think. I’d munch on a bit, but I’m not good at recognising the umbellifers and poisoning myself is not on my list of things to do today. The only time I ever did poison myself, I was a twenty year old hippy stoner more than a Ray Mears acolyte. I mistook Cuckoo Pint (aka Arum Lily, Lords And Ladies) for spinach. Duuurr! Instantly, my mouth went numb, my jaw seized up with cramp, I panicked and galloped to the local hospital clutching a leaf for identification purposes. What a plonker. I didn’t die, just in case you’re wondering how the story ends.

Right! Time to decamp. Mission today; try to find out if there’s any progress on the visas front.

Different birdsong and warmer sun inclines me suspect that maybe I am heading into more remote territory… I didn’t see any 7-11s yesterday, my primary internet nipple. Right, time to go find out…. And get some breakfast as I have no food at all currently. Oh! What a yummy peaceful sunny morning! 
The weather is kind to me the next couple of days, either sunny and or with the wind behind me. A spot of rain here and there, but nothing to get in a lather about. Must have wash today. Getting sticky. Nasty.

Its just as well I have the wind at my back a bit more. I have been counting down the kilometres from Wakkanai, generally chewing off about forty a day, according to the satnav on my phone. This is misleading though, as it is only measuring Wakkanai to my current point in a straight line so I’m certainly doing more than forty a day. And that’s usually heading south to north. I head off the northward coast on the 101 and start bearing east towards Aomori, effectively swinging across an imaginary circumference with Wakkanai at the centre, so today I pedalled like fury in top gear effortlessly(yahay!) With the wind behind me for most of the day, and according to my satnav only cycled nine kilometres. You wait til tomorrow; I’m back on the northward bound again then.

Lots of big burly motorbikes going past me on the other side of the road, some of them with equally big burly riders. A couple of them give me a thumbs up, and I thumbs them back, which is great; I love that little tingle of solidarity; brothers on two wheels, doing our own thing. About a week ago, I had pass by me a massive pearly white motorbike with enormous panniers. It looked like a Honda Goldwing, the ponciest big bike in the world. Its rider was dressed totally in white leather too with flappy sleeves. He looked like Elvis. Maybe he was Elvis.

In a moment of near noshlessness, I have discovered how to eat young bamboo. Before it goes woody, I discovered that by pulling at it, it comes apart in segments with the upper part being the outer fibrous bit and the lower part being sweet succulent and thoroughly edible so now I know what those pandas are up to when I see them idly chewing the apparently unchewable.

Not that I’ve seen any pandas. There aren’t any.

This has been a different trip indeed, barely talking to people, and because of not writing place names down, completely unable to remember where I have been. I have to confess, Japanese place names rarely lodge in my mind as there’s just nothing familiar to latch onto unless it sounds like English. Most of the place names you are reading here have been edited in afterwards by careful scrutiny and cross-referencing of fiddly bilingual maps. It made my head hurt.

Last week I did ride across a bridge named the ‘Bitchu Overpass’ which is what you might do with an extremely unpleasant woman and today I finally managed to piece together that I had finally made it to Ajigasawa. I have been waiting fifty kilometres since I first saw the sign for this place, so you’d better be grateful for that one. 

Camped out by a gravel bottomed forest. Got ominously blowy, but I’m still here. Must wash! Feel like I’m covered in dried salt. Which I probably am. Reading last night Josie dew again, this time her bike trek round the UK coast. She too describes the generally comfortable submission to a certain daily level of grime and keeping it on to use as an extra protective layer. I was reading an article in a magazine aimed at world bike tourers and here too I found a description of the person’s descent from urbane cleanliness to Neanderthal filthy camping cyclist. It’s good to know that I’m not the only scuzzball on the planet, and that actually there’s a whole subculture of us out here, getting it on with wind weather and trees and places. Just don’t sit next to us on a bus. 

Fantasising of pushing a pedal powered pedallo round the UK’s canals upon returning to England. Seems so sensible an idea. See the country, almost no contact with roads. Definitely no contact with road traffic; just boats and boaties, coots and swans, reeds and rippling water. Meeting people with wood burning stoves and having cups of tea. All under my own silent pollution free legsteam. How ace does that sound? Very ace indeed. A home-made raft with the appropriate bike bits glued on and a tent. Reminder to self; make sure I still have money left when I get back…
Coming off the western edge of the coast, there’s a subtle change in the architecture. In Ajigasawa town there are more concrete boxy-looking buildings. Maybe they have been with me all along the journey, but now I notice them more. Blocks of not-so-new not-so-old identical flats in town, painted creamy yellow with giant bird life painted on the end walls. Maybe this is just normal city stuff that I have been avoiding, but in my mind it seems like this is a town that gets hit by winter. It feels just a tad bleaker, in that way that the north always becomes (this is not a criticism; the north has a mystique all its own, one of having the ability to survive, I love it, and it always draws me back). 

I wonder if this is just a taste of places to come; here seems to have plenty of south about it, and a taste of the north. I wonder if Hokkaido will be a place all of its own, not like Honshu. I would guess that it’s northern ports at least, the influence of international trade with far Eastern Russia is going to blend the build in styles and the vibes of the places. I will have to go north and north again to Vladivostok to find out.

Yesterday I saw a style of fencing that reminded me of the way that the Sami sometimes fence their reindeer herds in. Young tree trunks used in rows of three horizontally along an A-frame course (as opposed to the usual upright posts). Stops the snow from knocking it all down. 

Now; it’s becoming summer.

May 5th. Just east of Hirani.

Today I encountered two lorries in succession carrying pigs. They are the only livestock vehicles I have seen in the entire time I have been in Japan. Conversely, yesterday out of town on the coast I passed three fish markets, all of them full to the brim with people buying. The last stretch I passed sold nothing but squid, and lots of it. You could have it barbecued on the spot. I didn’t try cos I really needed to get some miles down, but next time I get the chance I shall have some.

I downloaded some maps today, and whilst idly fiddling about I looked at the map for Azerbaijan for no special purpose and noticed that it has a region called ‘Ganja’. And an airport; Ganja Airport of course. Now That’s What I Call Flying! The mind boggles…(Biggles? Oh dear enough already).

Oma end of May7th.

I remembered the name of where I am for once; Oma is Dutch for grandma so that’s already in the old brainbox. Had a girlfriend with Dutch connections which is why I know something so apparently random. I also know a great many other random things which have not required having a girlfriend in order for them to be in my head.

Its been a day of spectacular heavy rain and sunshine both at once, but no rainbows curiously. I found myself heading up the edge of the Pacific for the first time since I’ve been in Japan. Notable for it’s utter languid blueness. It’s as if it knows it’s the sexiest body of water on the planet. 

Over the last few days I have encountered a number of things familiar to England but weird for Japan (certainly from the standpoint of which bits of Japan I’ve been to anyway).

Yesterday I saw fields of grass. First time I’ve seen those here. Maybe I just don’t get out and about enough. I saw two fellas with beards. Haven’t seen those in a while. That was surprisingly surprising. And a dog turd. Haven’t met any of those until today. It reminded me of how in England you can’t just plonk yourself down anywhere you like. You have to check for dog mines first. In Japan there are very few dogs and so dog turds are rare (as far as where I’ve been anyway). India on the other hand has very very many dogs, but like Japan, also has no dog turds; but this I think is because in India, one dogs turd is another dogs breakfast. Or possibly even the same dogs breakfast. Waste not want not.

I am the northern tip of Honshu. Tomorrow I board the ferry for Hakodate on Hokkaido. According to my supremely inaccurate satnav, I am exactly three quarters of my way to Wakkanai. I hope I don’t have headwinds like today’s all the way up. That would be immensely rubbish.

So that was Honshu… Any trip abroad is seen with rose tinted goggles on, especially in countries where I can’t understand either the spoken or the written word. (I am rendered oblivious to any written or spoken remark or slogan that I might find irritating/contentious/depressing/fascist).

Even so, I can’t help but find Japan something of a hippy utopia. More lovely lived in shacks than I’ve ever seen in my life. I do wonder how Japanese planning regulations must work. You couldn’t live in England like lots of people seem to do here.

 Every day I see people, usually oldies, out and about foraging for plants . small scale allotment plots everywhere, even in the cities (not right in the middle, but away from the centre). Cycle paths almost everywhere. Courteous drivers; cyclists have priority when crossing at T junctions! I only ever got cut up by vehicles about three times along the whole route so far. In England it would be happening every ten seconds on a main road. Vast swathes of gorgeous landscape, very often pristine forest. Clean mountain spring water.

Something I have noticed is that pretty much every old person I have encountered seems unhappy. I smile or wave sometimes to people when I go past and the oldies just blank me. Every time. Maybe they haven’t come to terms with how much has changed since the onset of the second world war. Maybe I just look like a total toerag.
May 8th.

In Oma, under unrelenting and mind-banteringly strong gusty winds, I had left it a little late to find a camp spot. I had been sitting, hiding in the ferry terminal investigating the timetable and could I sleep in here please, it’s mental out there?

The answer was no, the terminal shuts at 7.30pm.

My guess was that pretty much wherever I stuck my tent, it was going to result in what I call ‘crisp-packeting’ whereby the tent crumples and flaps deafeningly all night long. What’s that got to do with crisp packets? Not much apart from the noise, and the tent having a tendency to give up being tent-shaped.

Right outside the terminal, a greasy grotty gravelly car park with a fifteen foot high concrete seawall and a long double line up of giant concrete sea defenders looking for all the world like giant jacks (those strange metal things kids used to play with before computers turned kids into unimaginative lumps). 

I hastily decide that here is probably about the best anti-crisp-packeting wind protection I am going to get anywhere in Oma; being as the little town is situated right on the very northern most tip of Honshu, with a dirty great wind tunnel of the straits between here and southern Hokkaido. Exposed I think the word is. Extremely.

Up goes the tent; I am pitching in a car park, so with tent pegs redundant, I tie one end of the tent down with a guy rope looped and tied through a drain, the other end tied to my lying down bike, the extra blue plastic tarp on top and then everything flappable weighed down with lumps of broken concrete. Hey presto! I have created my own personal dwellable rubbish dump! 

Wind trying to undo everything; it fails.. Ha! Earplugs in. Trust that I won’t suddenly wake up to find I am lying in two inches of paddling pool. S!eep soundly.

Up at first light, successfully dry and cosy at 5.20am in time to pack up, wander the two hundred metres to the terminal, buy my ticket and board the 7am crossing. A two hour journey, I sit, and then it’s time to set peddle upon this brave new land!

I had somehow hoped that Hokkaido was going to be discernably different from Honshu, but it doesn’t seem to be. Not so far anyway. In the Hokadate terminal amongst the local produce they are selling chocolate coated crisps! Yes! Something I have often wondered about the possibility of, and here they are! I’m not buying any though, cos they’re hideously expensive. Hopefully I will find some cheaper ones further up the road.

Strong headwinds most of the day. Bugger. Stop early, I still managed to get my daily target of 40 kilometres in despite the conditions. It must be listening to Kraftwerk’s Tour we France album that keeps me push-push-pushing.

I camp at Ehiba Fishing harbour and in my waking awareness in the morning enjoy the spectacle of the rooks and seagulls feasting on a huge mound of discarded scallop shells that fishermen are dumping here. I am surrounded by neatly stacked fishy smelling piles of nets, crabbing baskets and great netted mounds of multi-coloured buoys. Little single-man fishing boats bob up and down in the quayside. It’s what they do best.

Route 5 takes me up coast most of the day. Amazingly, I am able to keep in an upper gear nearly all day. I think yesterdays non stop head wind must have toughened the old calves up a bit.

Slumped outside a Lawson station for a breather, I meet a red and white leather clad motorbike man who speaks perfect English. It’s the first actual conversation I have had since the two French guys a month ago. We chat over coffee and scones that he generously buys and manage to have a real conversation that doesn’t include any of the usual predictable waffle that usually gets said.(we talked about the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia of all things..) And he tells me that Hokkaido people are much more friendly than people in the south…. Just like Britain then.

Onward bound… Route 5 has been good to me, but I am getting fed up with little signs telling me every two kilometres how far I have come from Hokadate (where the ferry landed). Being continuously reminded of how far I’ve come is very much like watching a kettle boil; it just seems to make the day drag more than it would otherwise, so bidding the 5 a farewell as it veers off inland, I stick to the coast some more and follow the 37. Which is telling me how far I have travelled since central Otsakadate???. Oh well. Perhaps a change is as good as a rest.

Winding up a great long hill, I stop at the top, wash in a stream, and even though it’s only 4pm, decide to call it a day. Finding a gravel offshoot, I wind further up into a tree filled tributary and park. The flies have caught up with me and are misguidedly under the impression that I am their dinner. Hastily getting the tent up, I peel off the fly sheet and it goes into mosquito net mode, and in I go for a good dose of flyless reading and banana sandwiches.

As dusk comes, a variety of birds are all hooting and calling to each other. It is a wondrous and beautiful sound. Probably they are all saying things like:

I’m going home now Trev!

All right, see you tomorrow down by the pond again yeah?

Yeah okay, see ya!

Yeah see ya Tony!
Because that’s what bird life is like.

Thursday May 10th. Halfway between Shamambe and Toyoura.

I woke this morning to the sounds of various twittering birds, but most predominantly was the distinctive and familiar call of the wood pigeon. It seemed to be calling over and over the first few notes of the theme from ‘Bonanza’ the American cowboy TV series from the sixties. Last week, in another forest, the resident wood pigeon seemed to be calling out the opening twangy guitar-bit notes from the James Bond theme. Many birds are noted for their ability to mimic. Clearly these wood pigeons all watch too much television.

I have the most super-dawdling day ever, I slope up and down a few rises and drops, passing through lovely mixed deciduous and pine wreathed pointy hills, not quite mountains. It’s nice to be away from the sea for a change toward inland sights and smells. A herd of Holstein cows sitting in a field. I had quite forgotten what a wonderful smell cows have!

My route is heading for a promising looking blip on my map which consists of an enormous circular lake with a circular island right in the middle. An ex-volcano presumably. To get there necessitates passing through what looks to be a hugely long tunnel which in the multi-coloured spaghetti of road routes on the map I had completely failed to notice. I am getting a bit tired of tunnels now. The thrill of novelty of sci-fi concrete weirdness that gave way far too frequently to dicing with death and dirt. I pass through one such tunnel on the way today, which I had decided was about as exciting as a regional television news bulletin. (What is it about local news that’s so dull and miserable?)

Upon arrival at the unpromising stretch of tunnel, it transpires that in a fit of enlightened tunnel engineering, I get to have a path all to myself that is as wide as a car lane, but without the cars obviously. That really would be rubbish. There are two of these tunnels, each a mile long, and each with symmetry that transform the car sounds that pass along their lengths into weirdly distorted sub-bass echoing drones and hisses. It’s so intriguing riding through the first that I record the sounds passing through the second.

My exit from the tunnels, having effectively burrowed through the side of a (hopefully) dead volcano, rewards me with a stunningly calm lake with a series of pointy islands in it’s middle, far away enough to be shrouded in the mists of distance. They must be about three miles away. This my lovelies, is Toya National Park.

My route becomes the 578, a nice quiet road, with only the sound of water lapping on pebbles and birds twittering. I would record this too, loving these ambient moments, but it seems impossible for any such moment to ever last longer than forty seconds at the most before the unwanted sound of some car comes tearing through it all.

One day, within my lifetime probably, the oil and diesel and petrol is going to run out. I wonder what we will have after that’s gone? Batteries are going to be hard to produce without the aid of fossil fuels, so I am hoping we might return to real horse power and local economies instead of the one we have now where we buy apples from the opposite side of the planet whilst we grub up our own orchards, filling motorways with lorries transporting stuff that too often has no sensible reason to be cluttering up the roads.

Further up the road, (not much further either), it looks too lovely to leave, so I don’t. I don’t have very much of my journey left to do, so I might as well string it out and stop whenever I feel like it.

By the lakeside, I am enjoying the sight of a pair of swans… “Swans make a lake look more beautiful” to paraphrase Alice Walker. Then I spot a fox, crouched down right in the open on the shore. He has seen me before I have seen him. He is very close to the swans, but the swans don’t seem bothered. Are they all having an interspecies social, comparing notes about their day? Or is Mr. Fox trying work out how two swans in water might becomes dinner? Who knows. I certainly don’t. Mr. Fox legs it.
Taking the opportunity to recharge all my batteries for gizmos, I am camped at L’hotel De Convenience Publique. Disability toilets are great; they are spacious, they are private and they have electricity. I can have a proper strip-down all over wash and I can spread out quite comfortably thank you. This is the first time I have camped indoors on this Japanese trip, and it’s only cos I have a battery pack that takes all night to charge and it’s the only way I can recharge it.

Its raining outside (I’m certainly glad that it’s not raining inside; that would be awful) and the sky seems to be exploding quite dramatically. At first I take it to be thunderclaps, but upon investigation it seems to be the tourist town on the other side of the lake having a very firecrackers oriented fireworks bash. Very darned loud it is too. How appropriate for Toya to have Thunder In The Mountains…. (Obscure 80s music reference. How clever am I eh?)

May 11th. Lake Toya.

What a magnificent kip that was. I should sleep in public toilets more often.

Finishing my book whilst waiting for a battery to finish replenishing, a wind is howling outside. I’m definitely in no hurry. The book ends, the battery is happy again, the wind drops; it’s still a bit drizzly.

The lake view is beautiful, misty tufts cling to treetops just a bit further round the lake. I am clearly in a dead town where nothing happens and there’s nobody about to do it. It feels like a nice place though; the lake and it’s island exert a massive calming vibe here, an oasis of tranquility.

I breakfast at the. local convenience shop, a microwaved Bento box. For me that’s poshing it. Man cannot live by banana sandwiches alone. I slug it up out of Toya’s ancient caldera. The drizzle becomes rain and everything I am wearing clings to me. Either this waterproof coat is finally ruined or it isn’t and is containing my accumulative sweating very nicely. Whichever it is, I am wet through. That can’t all be sweat? Eurgh!

Interesting roadside plants, Japanese knotweed stems for more breakfast, I seem to be eating these every day now. I actually find them tasty as opposed to merely bitter and vaguely bearable like so many edible wild plants tend to be. Knotweed tastes like rhubarb. I don’t eat the leaves or the growing tips cos they taste slimy and weird, but the stems are great. I get to have real fibre in my diet!

Other plants around that are familiar from home; the early stages of giant hogweed (very poisonous), a form of buttercups, black Meddick (looks like clover and isn’t), silverweed, bugle, dandelions, coltsfoot (absolutely everywhere. Tried eating the stems of that and it was like chewing bitter boiled leather.) Red and white dead nettles. Edible but only if you are the kind of person that would consider chewing a pair of old underpants for extra nutrition. Today I see a great clump of stinging nettles, only for the second time since I have been here. They look slightly meaner than the British version so I will steer clear of these. They’re not the evil bastard version I found at Dharamsala anyway.

There are some really distinctive plants especially on Hokkaido. Some look like they might be edible, but I’m certainly not going to experiment without a visual guide book. 

The road steadily climbs up away from Toya and back onto the 230 which if I follow it to its conclusion, will lead me right into the heart of Sapporo. The drizzle becomes the kind of rain that is so cold and intense that it feels like I am being tapped repeatedly on the forehead with a small and persistent hammer. It numbs my forehead and makes my eyelids puffy. My hands are freezing and the sky is leaden. The landscape is a high plateau of farmland with actual ploughed dirt fields with new-sown crops in, as opposed to bounded paddle of mud and water. I think it’s sunflower country here. The day is grey and the plateau is bounded on all sides by snow capped dead volcano mountains. Stopping in a little town I fuel up. If ever there was a day to eat fatty sugary things with good reason, then today is definitely that day. Deep fried corn things covered in crusty sugar syrup and peanut flecks. Yummm. Little weird cakey doughnutty things made from rice flour. They feel like squishy rubbery objects that feel velvety like apricot fur. They’re super chewy and have sweet bean paste in the middle. Weird at the first bite, but definitely a winner and also perfect sugar hit carbo load biking nosh. Must remember to find out how to make these for when I’m back home…

The rain is unremitting and anywhere that might have been dry ceases to be. Vital to start turning that sugar into body heat and forward motion. From a landscape that was very much like Aviemore and the Speyside area of Scotland, the road climbs imperceptibly for a full twenty kilometres. Round every bend I’m thinking is must be the top now surely? And then it goes up some more. I am right up in snow filled forest, mostly rowan and birch. Against the sterile white of the snow, the shaggy birches glow with warm pearly peachy cream trunks. I seem to be level with the surrounding snow-crusted mountain tops.

Beautiful as it is, this is most certainly not a good place to camp for Mr. Soggy. Up ahead, a service station. Aha! This must be the summit then! And sure enough it is.

From an endlessly knee-swirling bottomest gear, I crunch up through to high gears to crest the summit. Ahead, I can’t see the road… It drops!! Yes!!

A sign tells me it’s 19km to the town and 49 to Central Sapporo. Let’s see how far I can freewheel this bike. My knees deserve a break. I’m hot. The road ahead winds graciously round the contours of the mountain ahead. The road looks perfectly horizontal, but it isn’t; I glide effortlessly at about five miles an hour for a good two or three miles, and then it starts to pick up pace a little. My free ride is rudely interrupted by a tunnel. An evil bugger it turns out to be too; the worst yet. Though I’m still free wheeling. Ha! I win!!

The standard rubbish in-tunnel kerbside starts off at the usual 26 inches wide. A bit crap but doable. Then the illuminations go a bit useless. Then there’s sticky-out box things on the wall. Then the regularly spaced metal drain covers on the path are so rusted through that it’s only a matter of not very much time before somebody on a bike not paying enough attention is going to go down the drain hole, over the handlebars and into the horrifically noisy badly lit road.

Then 26 inches becomes 14 inches. And the wall to my left is layered with all the exhaust fume dust that ever landed on it. Now another sticky out box. In the dark. This is scary. I stop. The tunnel goes quiet. Sod this. I ditch the stupid useless path and pedal like billy-o down the middle of the carriageway. I have no lights.(which is illegal in Japan. Now I know why.)

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Only another couple of hundred metres to go (the tunnel is about 700metres)… And I’m out again. Free!

Almost immediately, I am faced with another semi-tunnel of about 200 metres, and a narrow bridge across the valley. Quick check behind for traffic; nothing coming? Right, sod it, I’m done with being bloody polite on this road, and I wing it as fast as I can, through the tunnel, across the bridge… another quick check to see if I’m still in the clear… yes I am… Back into my normal proper cycle space again, and back to freewheeling. Hard cold rain, frozen hands, up out of the saddle to negotiate those unexpected sunken drain covers and ice-eaten bits of knackered tarmac. No brakes, all the way down; eyes taking turns to squint through the rain. Down and down I drop, 5 kilometres, 10 kilometres… 19 kilometres on, and I’m in Jozankei, perfectly placed for hot noodles, coffee and chocolate. The rain stops.

Rebalancing vital internal heat (not a big fan of hypothermia) I take off my soggy coat and my top and wring out the worst of the water content. Still wet of course, but a marked improvement.

I don’t usually drink coffee, but this hits the spot. I could have bought tea, but I have a very strong suspicion that would have been made in a decidedly un-English way. So far, the only country outside the UK I have been to where they make tea I enjoy is India and New Zealand.. Mainland Europeans try to foist you off with bland yellow stuff with no milk or sugar (yuk!), Americans aren’t even sure exactly what tea is, let alone how to make it. I bought Lipton’s tea in a carton yesterday. It was…. Interesting. But not really worthy of repetition.

Exiting town, still dropping downwards in the direction of Sapporo, I veer off almost immediately up a gravel track that runs up a cleft, alongside a very burbly babbly stream complete with alders and concrete waterfalls.

It starts raining again. Tent up, and in, carefully. Strip off inside, air my dampnesses and write my diary. Lovely!

May 12th. Jozankei.

Morning starts with the continuation of the freewheeling theme, first through the most well-behaved and respectable tunnel ever; clean, bright, super wide and smooth path. That’s my kind of tunnel. What kind of TV is it like I hear you ask? (Plainly I don’t, otherwise you would be both telepathic and have a voice so loud that the ministry of defence would quite to meet you).

Oh I don’t know what kind of TV show. Star trek next gen? Feature length double episode? It’s only a short tunnel so that doesn’t quite fit. Anyway, enough of this waffle. It’s not even Belgian waffle, so clearly I need breakfast.

The lovely smooth wide path continues for some miles, out of the upper-reaches of the now non-snowy mountains dropping a further ten clicks til I get to Sapporo’s edge whereupon it levels out and the tree-filled backdrop evaporates into housing lots and superstores.

Sapporo, in my fully-extensive exploration of it (I cycle in one end and straight out the other) seems pretty averagely Japanese city-ish. It’s only after getting three quarters of the way through that in realise that I am now totally used to the stop-start nowhere fast nature of the super dawdling traffic light system at every block junction. Doesn’t bother me at all. Hurrah for that.

Japan I have found, as mentioned somewhere previously, to be a bit thin in the amusing signage department, but today Sapporo city blesses us with the: ‘Beaver Planning Centre’ complete with a picture of a cartoon very pleased looking beaver (the animal, of course).

I try to imagine earnest young Japanese couples going inside to where there is a workshop with tools for making beavers, diagrams on the walls and lab-coated expert advice on hand should you require assistance. You were inking something else? Shame on you.
Not far from the beaver lab is a tall monolith of a sign which belongs to “Gaja” whatever at might be, I don’t know. At the bottom it has this to say for itself:

“17:00 – 21:30

We, through our table,

Provide the people

With happiness”
Well that’s very nice of them. I do hope it doesn’t hurt.

Onto a river-side route (always quicker- no traffic lights), willows and birds. A high river flow bulging with yesterdays rain siphoning out of the mountains, dark grey and in a hurry to get to the sea. Bit like me really. 

One bright pink wobble-bottomed jogger and one old lady foraging for knotweed stems later (see it’s not just me doing it) the city has quietly turned itself into farmland. I’m back in the Netherlands again. Out of the protection of high-rise concrete, it’s windy, and I’m looking for some trees to wind break on the preside of. I find them up ahead (where else!?) and when I get there, three old boys are playing daredevil stunts with metre long model airplanes. I get a free show of aerobatics as I am putting the tent up. I assure its ground-based pilot that I won’t be lighting any fires on his nicely mown airstrip. He in turn assures me that he won’t kamikaze his plane into my tent.

When they have run out of aeronautics juice, they pack and go, and I am left with a bankside of wind-blustered reeds and the ever-crazy trillings of multiple skylarks.

Oh so endeth the day, amen.
Friday May 13th. Ishikari River, Sapporo.

Its Friday 13th!!!! AAARRGGHHH!!!!

I was cold last night and barely slept at all. Dozed very slightly and started the day feeling slightly to the left of sideways. Daaahh!

I sit for a bit and that straightens me out lots. it’s sunny! And it looks like the wind might be blowing with me instead of against me for a change. This could be good! What could possibly go wrong?!

Setting off along the river, I’m in the Netherlands again. I encounter a paddock with eight shiny chestnut mares in it. I go and say hello; one or two of them perk up their ears and think about coming to say hello too, but decide against. I’m sure if I stayed here for an hour I could convince a couple to enjoy a neck scratch…. But… I got places to go, so… See yer me fine ladies.

Along the raised car-free road I encounter several middle-aged Lycra bike bandits looking very serious and huffing and puffing into the wind, whilst I pass them, oh so casually, tossing em each a regal nonchalant wave as I glide almost without effort in the opposite direction.

Its so sunny! And warm! The sky so blue! The skylarks so bonkers! Do they start their day with strong black coffee? It’s odd that I associate them with the most laid back of times, when the sound they make is possibly one of the most frenetic sounds in nature. Be interesting to hear what they sound like in a very slowed down recording. Lots of buzzards down by the riverside, hunting out mice in the grass.

Zipping back onto the coast in no time, I stop for provisions and a quick map-look. Oh bugger. Tunnels ahead. Many tunnels. In fact for one stretch, more tunnel than road. Grr. Going off tunnels. Did in mention that already? I did? Then it must be true then.

The road is pretty quiet, the sea is a gorgeous blue, languidly flopping half-metre high waves onto the shore filling the air with the reverberations of their drawn out tumblings. The road rises and drops weaving round headlands, edges of villages and between hills through opportune gaps. Then the opportunities cease and it’s tunnel time. Shall I compare thee to some form of science fiction? No I’m bored of doing that. I’m onto news readers now. The first one is very Trevor McDonald. Very neat and tidy and made very correctly and reliable. This is tenuous isn’t it? Good job I don’t care.

I had sort of been hoping to pass through a tunnel that somehow reminded me of Robert McDougal. Anyone remember him? He was from the 70s. It’s probably just as well that I haven’t passed through a tunnel that reminds me of him because he had a face like an assortment of scrotral sacks having a fight. I used to watch him when he came on the telly to read the news. He always looked utterly miserable. You would be too if you had a face like his. I was five, and liked to lie on the floor with my feet on the sofa watching TV upside down. Watching Robert McDougal’s collection of inverted facial saggings miraculously clamouring upwards was the funniest thing ever to watch. I was mesmerised by it. Who’d a thought it eh?

 This is all very well, but there then follows several lengths of tunnel in quick succession with a total combined length of about twelve miles. Some of them are easy, one of them is filthy and another has two sets of roadworks in it and lots of bloody road signs telling me so, plonked right in my way which means I have to get off and go round them cos they’re blocking the path. This one’s Jeremy Paxman. Oh I don’t know. It’s just another bloody tunnel.

May 14th Ofuyu camping spot

The coast can sometimes be a bit thin on camping spots, sometimes great concrete buttressed mountains squeeze right up to the sea leaving not very much excepting intermittent coves filled with higgledy-piggeldy wooden shacks, houses and fishing tackle. Ofuyu is one such place, and rather than me having to guess where to camp, there’s a big sign saying at here’s he place to camp. It’s free and it’s out of the prevailing wind. How very sensible.

In the morning whilst packing away, a rook comes right up to me within about five foot, giving me a cute tilted head trying to see if I remembered to save him any breakfast. At first I am a bit surprised; I’ve never been this close to a rook before. I throw him a corner off my sandwich. Which he gulps down in one go. That can’t be good for his digestion. Chewing it up a bit would have been better. With the chunk of bread in his throat, he caws. Or tries to. Comically, it ends up sounding a bit bread-muffled. He caws anyway. Still giving me the tilted head treatment and hopping about impatiently, I throw him another chunk. He gulps it down. This time it reappears a few times as he coughs it up, turns it round a bit in his beak and tries to swallow it again. Throwing his head back each time to get the thing to go down. Trouble is, the first piece of bread is probably still sitting in his throat. He is doing his best to call to his mates. I imagine his by now very muted cawing probably sounds quite promising to his as yet unseen chums.

Seconds later, about fifty rooks all arrive at once, most of them within ten feet of me. They’re all looking at, looking for a free meal. I am guessing, but many of the ones closest to me seem a little tufty on the tops of their heads, and I am wondering if they are the juveniles. They are all cawing at me, it is an amazing sound; I think I love the sounds of rooks cawing end masse better than any other sound on the planet. This morning I am indeed privileged and blessed.

Close up, I am able to hear each call distinctly, and it’s fascinating to hear the different types of call they make. Mostly they are going “ah” as the a in car. This sounds like a general “I’m here, I want some food”, sometimes it turns to a shortened ” o” as in the o in hot. These sounds are all individual, and called at random timings. Like football fans, they would go into short sporadic bursts of all calling “o, o, o, o” for up to about twenty seconds, all calling in unison. They was something quite powerful about them all doing it together. A less rook-endeared person than me might have found it a little menacing. The “o, o, o” chanting always seemed to be initiated by one or two specific rooks. In amongst these calls, I notice a couple of older rooks giving some very extra- guttural sounding gurgly “a” s. It seemed like all these sounds served specific purposes. It would be lovely to know more about how they all work together.

I throw them bits of bread up in the air, and marvel as sometimes twenty birds at once all clamour for the same mid-air spot where the bread or bit of fish is. I try feeding them by hand, but even though a few of them try to take from my hand, each of them flaps off wildly, bottling out at the last moment. I’m sure if I sat here and did is for longer that they’d give up being quite so suspicious. 

I try giving them carrot. Yep, they’ll go for carrot.

Only once is there anything at looks like a fight. One took gets beaten off from a morsel and chased away by two others. I wonder what he did wrong?

They stay with me, after my breakfast for nearly an hour. They are all around me, on the ground, sitting on the fence I am leaning against, about fifteen of them in a line. One sits expertly on top of a very thin pole. I certainly couldn’t do that. 

One young bird sits quite close to me on the fence almost at eye level. He looks completely unfazed about sitting so close. We look into each others eyes… It must be love. I try whistling a nice relaxing tune, and then singing and humming. He responds by tilting his head at first and then his eyes start to blink rather a lot. Maybe I am sending him to sleep. What a nice way to start my morning.

Well listen guys, it’s been lovely to meet you all, a real privilege. And you’ve eaten all my remaining food. But, must crack on; got roads to ride down. See ya…

As I stand to get to my bike, I notice the dried stem of a mares tail, looped round into a circle, looking very much like a bangle. It is sitting g sign in the middle of the blue plastic I had been sitting on. There isn’t any mares tails here, the grass is all very green and alive.

I recall the story (its on YouTube) of a young American girl who would feed the rooks in her garden every morning. She did it every day for years. In return, they would leave her little gifts; curiosities as seen through the eyes of a rook. Small things, sometimes natural, sometimes man-made. Funny shaped bits of wood, a flower, a bottle top; all sorts. The girl has kept them all, and keeps them in a special room in the house for them.

Maybe the mares tail bangle was there all the time, maybe a rook put it there. I don’t know. It looks nice though. I put it in my top basket.

After I have left, I stop up the road and look back. They are giving the spot where I was sitting a thorough investigate.

As I pedal off into the sunshine, I notice every rook I pass as it caws. I wonder if it is part of the clan I just left, whether they bond as one and can communicate by some strange telepathy. I don’t know.

More tunnels today, some short, a couple very long. No problem. News reader of your choice. I don’t care anymore. 

Woah I can’t stop eating today! Every time I pass a shop, it’s bread cake and chocolate-based goo of varying kinds. I even manage to fit in a healthy tinned fish sandwich with raw onions as well.

I stop just a little further up the road after Ebira and investigate an abandoned house, maybe to sleep in. It’s a bit ripped up inside. Was this birds, weather or a person that did this? Probably all three. Nothing very much of interest to see. Several wooden sculptures. One of an old bearded man, an owl and a youth ladies head. Another wooden mask of a pretty girls face. It’s very life-like but the eyes look blank. I consider taking it but it’s a little bit freaky.

Its going to be dark very soon. Across the yard are two of these odd looking triangular sheds that I have seen a few of. Like wooden A-frame tents with normal doors at the end. Steep sided, so the snow just drops off. One of them is full of useless junk and the other, although strewn with wind blown leaves and desiccated sunflower husks, looks like it’s been used recently as a hang out. There’s a nice thick blanket here and lots of foam cushions. That’s handy. I am very impressed by what sort of space there is inside. In an similar way to a tipi, it has room enough to stand up in, an sense of height and is broad at the bottom for plenty of floor coverage. I am quite inspired by this construction. It would be really really easy to build, very strong.

Its not very pretty on the outside, but info wonder whether the outside roof/wall could be transformed into a garden with rows of planted beds and some steps in the middle for access.

I have this enduring fantasy for building a house that is either alive itself, or merges with the landscape in a live way somehow. What I can see here is a way to have a sizeable place to live combined with a garden all on the same very limited ground space. Hmm. Interesting.

Its carpeted too. I think the YMCA in Shimla was the last carpet I encountered.
May 15th. Shosanbetsu.

Is the day I see a Soya Bus and fall off my bike. The two are of course completely unrelated. The northernmost tip near Wakkanai is in the Soya Bay. Looks like the local bus company is called…

Textured Vegetable Portage. Or something. Nice one for my vegan bus driving friends.

Falling off my bike was dumb. There I was, tootling along about ten mph, looking at a rail in the road that was getting nearer and I would need to steer out into the road a little to avoid crunching into it. So I steered out a little. Not noticing the one inch high discrepancy in height between the tarmac I was riding on, and the tarmac on the right I needed to be on. I went to the right, my front wheel decided it couldn’t go up one measly inch, so it stayed right where it was. I landed on my right knee, grazing it and ripping my trousers. A passing car slowed to see if I was okay but drove on when it saw me get up immediately. Lying with my head in the road is not the most sensible place to hang around.

May 16th.

91kms to end point. But only in a crow-flying straight line. Do crows fly in a straight line? I suppose they do sometimes. Mostly I see them swooping about, being a bit dodgy.

I guess I’ve got two days to go. Then that’s it. Japan trip finished. I feel a bit sad about it in a way. Partly because I will be giving up the bike. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with it. Posting it on to the next planned bike-able bit (Turkey) will cost loads more than just getting another bike when I get to turkey. I could try selling it, but for the small problem of me being supposed to have registered the bike. Technically, it’s registered in someone else’s name; i.e. technically, I’ve nicked it. Which I haven’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Japan has been good to me and I’ve got quite fond of it’s ways. The wildness, the little weirdnesses, the politeness, the cleanliness (except Hokkaido which has loads of rubbish, well about the same as you find in England). I have enjoyed the utterly incomprehensible urge for the Japanese to attach bouncy fluffy cartoon animals to everything, including their fire stations. Oh, Japan. I must leave you, and go to some other place. It’s fine. It’s just that transition time. It’s always strange. Once I’m on the plane to wherever I’m going next, I’ll be all excited again, and Japan will fall into the background.

I have a very generous tail-wind scooting me up the 231? nicely. All goes to plan until I take a wrong turn. Exiting a small town it’s only after I’ve gone about six miles that I realise that I’m heading east instead of hugging the coast. Looking on my satnav I spot a variety of similar shortcuts. I backtrack, following one of the three available shortcuts that all pass through farmland. I realise that I like the look of the one that follows the river better. Simpler route. Except, when I have to push my bike across the field, I fail to spot the ditch I have to cross to get to plan B. The route I want is only about a hundred metres away, so it’s worth the effort. Except that when I cross (its got flowing water) and go a little further I realise there’s another ditch. And then another one after that. Arseholes. Pushing through the fields itself is no easy matter either, all lush long growth and soft spongy dirt. Eventually I am free from the fields and their lovely ditches, and I rise up along a dyke bank with a gravel track. The simple route. The track runs alongside the river which in turn is running parallel to the coast road that I am aiming to ultimately get onto. I can see it from here. It’s fairly close. The bridge I need is about four miles away. Into what is now a strong headwind. This in itself is fine. Four miles of headwind is a price worth paying if that same wind is going to push me up the next bit of coast, which has a great long straight stretch of road. Potentially very dull by the looks of it.

The gravel track I’m currently on is awful. It’s big loose chunks of road stone that shifts about as I slide about over its decidedly unstable surface. Fine if you’re in a truck;\shit if you’re on a bike.

Not only that, but it’s so bumpy I can imagine if I rode for a day on this, half the small bolts holding the weight of my panniers would shear, my tyres would probably get shredded. As it is my front basket is bouncing like it wants to break free. It makes me wonder what cycling through Siberia or Mongolia might be like, where the track I am currently cursing might be considered a good road. The going is hard. Head down, I count my pedal pushes up to a hundred just to give me something else to think about. When I get to a hundred I start again. And then again. Eventually, the blip-sized bridge does indeed eventually get nearer. I have to count to about seven hundred before it does though. I reach the bridge. Head wind becomes mildly buffeting side wind. The horrid gravel becomes lovely smooth tarmac. The view of where I have just cycled is stunning. Away to my left, an enormous snow-covered mountain of Fuji-san proportions rises up out of the sea about thirty miles out into the water. The road I am about to follow, the 106, has a thin dark grey beach full of beach-combable wood and detritus edged with the now ever-present short form bamboo, then the road, then bamboo covered dunes, then the wide river I have just been following, then the shitty track, then forest; it’s all relatively flat, and so stretches out over an enormous landscape.

Tailwinds again, and I’m zipping along in top gear all the way, no effort. The area I have just described, I am now informed, is the Rishiri-Reban Robetsu National park. Not suit sure what makes it special in particular, but this is the largest area I have been in so far that is void of buildings. Apart from a rest stop half way with a toilet block and the nearby remains of a pretty messy harbour (wind-destroyed buildings), I cover forty kilometres of empty unpeopled landscape filled mostly with the snort stemmed buff coloured bamboo rising up and down on endless with blocks of young pines behind it. The road is wonderfully smooth, dead straight for much of it, and by 4pm, I find myself on the outskirts of Wakkanai. I have come twice as far as I thought I would get.

I celebrate my almost completion of the trip with a carton of orange juice and some minty chocolate. Not together. That would break even my hardy taste buds.

A passing policeman decides that he wants to see my passport. I tell him he can’t because it’s in England. I show him my driving license instead, and he dutifully writes down all relevant information. He is impressed that I have cycled all the way from Kagoshima and no thank you he won’t have a piece of minty chocolate. He is satisfied and happily goes away. At which point I notice that he whilst he was standing by my bike, two ragamuffin crows have made off with the loaf of bread that I just bought. Hey! Policeman! Come back and arrest these bloody birds!

I head off for a camp spot. I see trees! Aha! Some notices seem to be telling me that it might be bear country. Well it’s definitely tent putting up time, so I’ll take a chance. If you never get to read this, it’s because the bears got me. Goodnight.

May 17th Wakkanai

Before sleep, nearby was some noises so shrill at first I thought some prankster was blowing a whistle. But it wasn’t; it was some animal sound I’ve never heard before. It came complete with ‘thrashing through the undergrowth’ noises. Wild animal sounds when you first hear them, can be something quite unexpected. When our family moved to the countryside when I was ten, we lived next to a deer park, and the odd shrill squeaking noises were not what I would thought would be the noise coming out of a deer; a sound deeper than a dogs woof would have been the right noise surely, being as they look a bit doggish but bigger? 

I know that forest/jungle birds very often have very simple high pitched calls rather than the elegant and complicated trillings of birds from open countryside (note that the humble chicken began its evolutionary career as a south east Asian jungle-bird). This is because to communicate in densely wooded areas, loud simple calls are the clearest ways of being actually heard and then located.

A friend of mine who used to be a gamekeeper before he went all vegetarian on himself told me that he would the attract the attention of horny boy badgers by emulating the sound of horny lady badgers. He did this by getting two large pieces of expanded polystyrene, making them wet and then rubbing them together to make a high pitched presumably sexy badger noise.

So perhaps the unexpected squeaks I am hearing are bear sounds, seeing as how they are most definitely forest creatures. Or maybe it’s just some weirdo out for some sexy polystyrene fun. Well whatever it was, it didn’t want me or my stash of banana sandwiches. 
Into the town of Wakkanai, just around the corner from this otherwise peaceful bit of woodland park that I’ve slept in. Hey the signs are all trilingual! Well I kind of expected that, as I am sure the town gets its fair share of day trippers from Sakhalin, the Russian island just forty kilometres across the strait. Lots of shops signed only in Russian. It brings home to me that Russia is actually an actual place actually, and not merely some notion of stern and grumpy consulate comrades that will judge whether my scuzzy personage is fit for consumption by the motherland….”Your het iss now goood, end you smell like a feish. Komputer It Says No!” but in severe Russian accent…. Actually I am rather hoping that Komputer vill say yes after having got scrubbed up.

I email Machika, the very sweet lady from the bottom end of Kyushu who offered to post my rucksack to me when I’d finished. Then I check with the post office here that she hasn’t sent it already. She hasn’t. Good. 

I try calling her and two of her friends to confirm that I would like my rucksack posted to Sapporo and not Wakkanai as we had originally planned. The bright green telephone box quite happily eats my 100yen coins and gives me lots of beeping and cheery bouncy ladies voices gibbering away in gobbledygook. I think they are saying “the person you are trying to call isn’t in at the moment, but thanks for all your cash, I shall enjoy going out and playing at the pachinko and slot with it later on.”

I feel agitated. I am stumped by technology, I don’t know how to ask for assistance. I am wearing three day old socks that are stuck to my toes, my face feels all scratchy and unwashed.. I go slightly bonkers like a horse does anyway when it’s windy, which it is. And I’m at the end of my trip almost, which always puts me in a weird frame of mind.

The first thing I need to do is realise that I’m getting strung out. And then change into some clean (er) socks, so sitting on the pavement next to a queue at a bus stop I duly exchange minging sockage for some pedular self-improvement. With a wonky hat on, I could be a Russian agent. These socks might be nuclear. Be careful folks.

Business in Wakkanai done, I attempt to head out of town towards Soya Point, the northern most point of Japan. In order to do that, I need to first head southwards round the bayside which will then of course turn north. I can barely move the bike. This is the wind that brought along the coast oh-so-easily yesterday. The really worrying thought is that, assuming I don’t just cop out and jump on a train, if this head bears up for the next week, I will have 280 kilometres of this. Which I really really don’t fancy.

I see the bus depot for Soya Buses, and duly go into bus-spotter mode and take a photo or two. Not long after that, I see a bus painted up like the Catbus from the cartoon film ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ which is very exciting, but it’s gone before I can take a picture. Watch the film. It’s lovely. The Catbus is a bus that is also a cat, and it flies. 

Eventually I’m round the bend (as it were) and heading north. Zipping along, I say hello goodbye to the most northern Japanese shed, the most northern Japanese primary school, the most northern Japanese old lady pushing a trolley, the most northern Japanese… You get the idea.

Except that just when I think the headland I can currently see is the tip, it isn’t and I go past another one. ‘Soya’ is clearly a very amusing name for a place. I take pictures of signs for ‘Soya Park’ and ‘Soya Bridge’ which is all of about ten foot wide. I think somebody just wanted to be able to put the sign up. Round the corner is ‘Soya Hill’.. Okay the jokes worn off now.

Towards The End I turn on my satnav just so I can watch it go to zero. 506m, 153m,70m,145m…oops I’ve gone past it. 65m,7m,4m. I can’t get it any closer to zero. I have seemingly for the last several weeks been aiming myself to a scratchy bit of tarmac in a carpark next to a public lavatory. To be honest, I don’t know why I bothered really. That’s that then, time to go home again.
The southern tip at Cape Sata had a single notice board telling you where you were, a gravel area to stand in, and a path leading to a lighthouse. Here up north, there is rather more going on. Several statues; one or two stern and important looking Japanese fellows stood stock-still come wind rain or snow. A pointy concrete triangular thing. Every place like this has its own pointy concrete triangular thing. Sometimes they are chromed steel pointy triangular things. Every northern-most tip in the world probably has one. Cross the Article Circle in Norway or Finland and they both have one each. Russia probably has dozens of the things, and there I don’t doubt, is a country that excels in pointy triangular concrete things. The North Pole? Probably has the Eiffel Tower, but in concrete.

Anyway, it’s very nice actually, and so too think a hoard of excited persons who have now offloaded from a Soya Bus and are busily engaged in doing bouncy selfie thing. I watch them. It must take them a whole fifteen minutes, barring one or two ditherers intent on wrecking the drivers schedule. I used to be driver (did I mention it?!). The temptation to just leave the ditherers behind is enormous. It would probably be a week before they noticed that something was amiss.

I generally don’t go in for Wikipedia-suctioned infoblah whilst writing this thing, but here are some vague bits that I can barely remember because I didn’t write them down at the time.

Famous Japanese poet Akebono wrote a poem whilst sailing in the sea here saying how very nice Soyamisake is. Someone else wrote a symphony. It can be heard here, coming out of a large rock. It’s actually quite nice.

The island of Sakhalin until 1825 belonged to the Japs and used to be called Kerrin or something like that. Just squint at the map, and you would guess that the island looks like it should be Japanese rather than Russian..

A copper bust to some French fella who supposedly discovered the passageway through the Strait in about 17hundred and something or other. Which makes no sense whatsoever. Surely the Japanese and the Russians had being making their passage through here since forever. Perhaps neither lot felt the need to crow about it.

On the hill above is the World Peace Park, which features a couple of large clanging bells, a war memorial to the USS Wahoo an American naval ship which the only reason the Japanese blew it up in 1941 killing 260 servicemen on board was because the same battleship had been hanging around for weeks picking off Japanese fishing boats and generally being a nuisance.

There’s some very peaceful forgiving and forgetting for you.

Pride of place and utterly unmissable, is a supremely tall concrete triangular pointy thing, about a hundred metres high and looks halfway between an origami peace crane (a paper crane in Japan is often offered as a symbol of peace) and it also looks like Concorde stood up on it’s end. Expecting to read something about the importance of global friendship or similar, bell it is a list of names, some of them written in English. Next to it is an epitaph to another 200 or so person who died when in 1983 a Boeing 737 passenger flight from New York bound for South Korea via Anchorage accidentally flew into Soviet airspace and was subsequently shot down by Soviet missiles killing everybody on board. The Japanese would like to know the truth about. What happened that fateful day. Whatever that means.

I can’t help think that the giant peace crane upright airplane pointy triangular concrete thing also happens to rather look like somebody ‘giving the finger’ to someone say, ooh, about forty kilometres away.

Hmm. Odd place this.

I celebrate my most northern-ness with another banana sandwich and by washing and sleeping in the public toilet on the hill. The wind is ferocious up here. If anyone should want to turf me out, at least they can see I have some sort of reason for not doing tent-thing.

I wash everything and recharge everything and sleep like a log in the toilet. Perhaps not the best analogy.

I feel rather weird about life. My current main purpose is finished. I am attached to my bike and am worried that not being on a bike is going to feel like an anticlimax, that the Russian consulate won’t let me in. At least I am pretty certain that my Mongolian visa is on its way.

I haven’t spoken to anyone from home on the phone since I left England and I haven’t had the use of hot water for washing once since I left England four months ago. All remedy-able of course.

Across the way, seemingly abandoned, a mamachari bike. It has three speed hub gears with an integrated rear disk brake and an all-enclosed chain guard. This is fast becoming the bike of my current dreams except it would need to be either a Sturmey-Archer five speed hub gear or possibly a Shimano Nexus 8 speed. Sigh…. I love bikes. Maybe I can let go of my current steed after all.

Inside a rest room is a poster advertising the joys of Sakhalin; a statue of Lenin, a church. Two pretty young ladies, the whitest people I have seen in months, another pretty young lady dressed up in presumably national costume of a red floral bonnet with lace around it. Strangely, this does more to shift Russia out of the realms of abstract map-noodling and more into the realms of possibility. Previously looking at Sakhalin on the map, I had imagined it to be only a wasteland of forest and ruined dirt tracks (I also have Ewan Macgregor and Charley Boorman’s ‘Long Way Round’ to thank for that image), with only hungry bears and lost vodka-soaked foresters and military engineers covered to their elbows in grease. But no. It has pretty ladies. And culture. And probably real roads too.

Its funny how very often looking at what seem to me, sitting at home in the comforts of my own Englishness, far away places will usually seem to conjure images of desolation and possibly dread. But hey actually, maybe everything is local and normal. Just depends how close you happen to be standing next to it at the time.

So Russia becomes more tangible.

The following morning the wind has dropped, the turgid sky has lifted, and Russia becomes so tangible that I can actually SEE Russia. It’s only forty kilometres away, and there it is, a thin shadowy grey line of undulating mountain tops stretching across the far horizon of the sea.

Hello Russia! I call and wave. It can hear me. That’s nice. See you soon! Hopefully!

Clearly, I have spent too much time without conversation. I doubt that going to Russia is going to resolve that one. Really must get the hang of telephones.

Heading off I carry on round the coast. Goodbye most northerly shed! Goodbye most northerly fishing boat! …Etc…

The 238 Is almost totally empty. It winds between gorgeous forest full of non-complicated bird yelpings. Mercifully the wind is behaving itself. It’s even very sunny. Reaching some little village I stop and restock in banana sandwich-building materials and some chocolate cornflakes and milk for breakfast. Breakfasted on a seawall, dangerously close to about two hundred seagulls none of whom seem in the least bit interested in ram-raiding my panniers, thankfully.

I feel knackered. I really can’t be bothered. It now occurs to me that it’s been 16 days since I last had a day of non-cycling. I doze for an hour in the sun, then read a bit (Mark Twain; Roughing It. Very funny.)

Eventually I figure I could squeeze a few more miles in and ride down through lovely dairy country… Lushious green pasture backed with low-lying birch and pine forest, low snow-capped mountains far on the horizon. This looks like the kind of. country that probably disappears entirely under snow for long winters and then come spring looks all yellowed muddy and flattened in the spring melt. Now, the passing heady scents of cow poo, sileage. I daresay if I was approached by a woman that smelled of anything cow-related, I suspect that I might get very excited indeed.

At Hamatonbetsu I replenish stocks. Chicken and chips for tea. Well the nearest I’ll get to that in Japan anyway. I find a lake just out of town to camp by. It is totally quiet.

Half an hour later, a car pulls up about fifty metres from me, headlights beaming right at me, leaves the engine running. Twats.

Burying my annoyance for about two minutes, I end up just saying rather loudly; why can’t you turn your bloody headlights off they’re getting right in my face and while your there why don’t you turn your bloody engine off you come to somewhere really nice and you ruin it. You spend all your time in your fucking car and you don’t even know what your doing you’ve got no sensitivity to where you are you morons.

All I get is a ‘uh?’ in response. And they don’t bloody understand bloody English.

Not getting the message, they stay right where they are. I turn and face into the glaring headlights mouthing this time: ‘piss off go away time to leave fuck off’.

 Clearly this bloke in that tent over there is a nutter and is going to be a distraction. And so they drive off. Hooray! I win!

Some time later I record the sound of the water for about an hour in the middle of the night. It’s almost full moon.
May 19th.

I rise late. It’s a beautiful sunny quiet lakeside tired-to-the-bone don’t-want-to-leave-Japan morning. Were it not for the fact that I really do need to get to Sapporo sooner rather than later, I feel obligated to peel myself away from reverie and put some miles in.

Not only do I have potentially tricky visa business to attend to and a bike probably to say goodbye to (boo-hoo!), more significantly, I am down to my last 4000 yen which under normal spending would last me about four days at the most. More likely three days. The only place I can get cash from the ATM’s at 7-11s. Of which there are none in northern Hokkaido, though there are some in Sapporo. Which according to my satnav is 230 straight arielly-inclined clicks away. When I get to the road, one of those regular reminder signs tells me that it’s actually 305. Oh joy. I suppose that your just going to sit there and slowly wind your number downwards whilst I slowly starve to death ar’ncha?

Its windy. In-my-face windy. Oh boy. A perfect storm of unhelpful weather, almost overwhelming lethargy and more than a slight psychological reluctance all combine. Fortunately in this perfect storm nobody drowns and George Clooney is not to be found anywhere in this picture. Only me.

Leaving Hamatonbetsu in the 275, which if I follow it to its conclusion, will take me straight to Sapporo train station, next to which will be found the central post office where (hopefully) my lost little rucksack will be waiting to be reunited with me.

Did I mention that is was windy?

I can feel my legs trembling slightly, which is surely a sign that I really ought to be resting. And possibly eating something other than banana sandwiches whilst I’m at it. Push, push, wobble, push. At the first available pitstop (is a Sercomart) I stop and re-water. And banana sandwich. Gnahh! And read for a while.

Setting off again, feeling obligated to chip away at least a little of that dreaded 305 figure, I head off down through a flat level road that’s almost empty, passing neat diary farms, cows, round plastic-wrapped sileage bales, larch plantations, pine and the ever present mountains.

A cyclist approaches! A European! She stops! It’s a lady! Hello! I call enthusiastically. She replies in Japanese, we exchange clunky where-are-you-goings, and then me having now exhausted my conversational possibilities, I wave goodbye and set off. Rolling down the road I reflect upon how pretty and fit she looked, which gives me something to occupy my tired mind for some considerable mileage.

I stop again at 4pm. Feels like I must have done 30kms. I’ve done 15. Find a spot next to the road. It’s not a fantastic spot. Flies home in on me and decide that they like me. I’m feeling tired and not socially-inclined toward the flies. I up-tent and crawl in. And promptly fall asleep.

I wake about 9.30pm to a peculiar swooping sound. At first I thought it was a passing car, but upon further repetitions, it sound like some bird is dive-bombing towards my tent and veering off at the very last moment. Wow, weird sound. In the trees I hear another weird sound; a night bird making its call which sounds something like water being rapidly suctioned down a drain, but slightly more musical than that. The swooping and gurgly bird drain noises continue for as long as I am awake now at least. 

The moon is shedding its dappled blue-grey light, harmonising everything with its vivid colour scheme. Night wind blows through the aspen and willow I am camped next to, a sporadic gushing of bass rumbling to the accompaniment of trebled rustlings of the short bamboo thicket below. Our bird continues, I think it must be an owl, but try as I might I can’t see it.

Beautiful. That’s quite a payoff for a slightly unsatisfying day. My previous exhaustion combined with having only just woken up means that my brain doesn’t go into analysing mode for once. I’m just here, and it’s just stunning. That’s all. Doesn’t happen often but when it does, it’s magic.

The owl moves off down the edge of the wood, exploring further hunting grounds. I return to my precious sleep.
May 20th.

The following day is another slow one, I camp next a broad churning peppermint green ooze of a river some 20 kilometres further on at Bifura.

Just before tenting up, I had stopped at one of those Japanese services that sells local produce. Whilst there I WiFi’d a little, tried (and failed) to use a green public phone box to try and call home, despite following to the very digit the instructions found on the internet). A huge plasma TV screen sits on the wall before me, sucking me in, I am fascinated by its other-worldliness. The news is on. It’s interesting to note that the format is identical to the British (which in turn no doubt were both copied from the Americans, who invent everything that’s modern and useful). A man and a woman exchange news stories to each other, a slightly less attractive person stands slightly goofishly to one side. Either a weather reporter or a sports commentator. When the more attractive man and woman are done telling us about our local fraudsters and rapists and why we should lock our doors and never go out, it’s his turn.

A picture of a mother giving her toddler an ice cream;

“Today in Northern Sapporo, a young mother bought her young son an ice cream. He got it mostly all over his face. Approximately 34% of it actually went down the hatch.”

One of those almost-funny stories to tag on the end of the other dreary news so we can go to bed not having nightmares and wanting to emigrate? 

Nope, there’s more: pictures of people walking about in town. Yes? And some more people walking about. Yes? And the ground looks all a bit shimmery. Oh and everyone’s in short sleeves. Ah! A heatwave! In Sapporo? Tokyo? Okinawa? Round about now, it should be getting all hot and steamy in Southern Honshu. I am glad I am not there to experience it. I am definitely English in so many ways. Possibly my ancestors were Vikings or Saxons at least. Certainly not southern European. Show me the sun and I flop like a burst hot water bottle.
May 21st full moon

Phew! What a scorcher! Well now you know.

Down to my last pennies or whatever baby yenlets are called, Bifuka, the town I camped outside has a 7-11. I draw out oodles of cash and promptly buy myself a five pack of mint choc chip ice creams for only 225yen (about 1.30 pounds). Having finished those off, a buy a four pack of choc ices. I also buy some real food as I’m heading up off the main drag away from towns. Where I’m going may be a shopping-free experience.

Its possibly just as well that I’ve had such an energy-loaded breakfast. No sooner than I have turned off the main road (I’m still following the 275) than I start hill-climbing. As the road disappears round each bend I have a dim hope that this will be its crest, but entering each bend the curtain of trees draws back and reveals only further climbing. I remember at the start of this bike trip I encountered a long winding mountain ascent which looked a proper killer of a climb. Before ascending it I made a mental challenge to myself to see how few times I could stop in order to get up it. Apart from taking a photo midway, I found that by putting myself in the very lowest gear and taking a steady non pushing approach, I could very on almost indefinitely though it was certainly hard work. I’ve been able to take this approach successfully throughout the trip, but now…. I’m knackered. Either I’m not eating right, or not eating right has finally caught up with me. Or maybe that I still haven’t had a proper day off for three weeks. Or maybe that by the time I get to Sapporo I will have cycled more than 2500 kilometres in two months with barely a stop en route. Maybe those earlier hill-climbs were powered by two and a half years of accumulated coach driver flab. It seems to be missing now. I’m almost man-boobless too. Just wait until I stop riding the bike. It’ll all be back on within two weeks.

I stop four times on the way up. There’s a large metallic green beetle to take photos of, a stunningly vast view midway from a three hundred metre wide span of bridge to admire.

Its peculiar being so hot and sweating so much, and there being snow all about me in ragtag dirty drifts of winter leftovers clinging to the shadows of the pines. I consider stopping and fashioning myself a hat made from snow. No, it would just be pfaff. It would slide off, give me a head ache or somehow attract the unwanted attentions of the only policeman in Hokkaido.

The road is virtually empty, and isolated mountain wonder is almost totally solitary. About ten cars go past in two hours. The good tarmac road keeps climbing for about eight kilometres; it feels much further.

At the top of what I discover is called Bifuka Pass at a lowly height of 443 metres is another sign informing me that the village I am about to enter has, at some point, recorded a winter temperature of -44.2 degrees . presumably that’s centigrade. I get confused about which is centigrade, Fahrenheit, Celsius or Kelvin.

The village, a broad spread of dairy farms and a scattering of houses in between; you would have thought that they might have huddled a bit closer together if it was going to get so cold in winter- has a toilet and re-watering point which I duly head for. A large LED temperature gauge informs us that it’s currently 28.7 degrees. I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it’s hot. It’s the first time I have felt it necessary to seek out shade. Was it this hot in the Rajasthan desert? I don’t think so.

At the watering hole there stands…. A triangular pointy chrome thing. Well not one, but actually seven of the blighters. You can never have too much of a good thing it would seem.

These gigantic objects placed in little places find their siblings in the inexpertly sculptured ‘giant turnip’ or giant crabs cast in concrete that greet you as you enter nowhere in particular. Welcome to Turnip-town! Home to the region’s unique turnip ice cream and turnip burger! Come try some! We’re desperate! Out of town supermarkets are ruining our economy!

Apart from all that though, for once this particular edifice is really quite something. In a clearing fifty metres wide surrounded by birch trees all shiny in the sun stands these seven triangulated columns of polished chrome, rising like ten metre high ice shards. So perfect is the mirroring on the chrome, that mostly all that can be seen when looking at them is the reflection of the birch trees and the brilliant blue sky. It’s as if it is camouflage. (Stealth Sculpture…)

The effect is such that from certain angles you almost don’t see parts of this huge metal construction, creating the illusion of a translucency with refracted images of trees. It comes surprisingly close to doing a fair impression of giant ice shards.

This sculpture holds particular interest to me; I have an ongoing fascination with designs for ‘invisible’ homes and dwellings. Usually these ideas tend to revolve around covering a dwelling with plants or being made from actual live trees. One idea I have is to build a tree house in a pine plantation whereby the treehouse is a cube of mirror. In the regular spacings of a plantation the tree house would be practically invisible. I would like to build one.
I continue on, passing through Finland, Montana, Monmouth, Norway, Gloucestershire. Maybe I should give my head a rest and just get on with being in Hokkaido?

The warmth of the sun lifts the bittersweet almond scent of willow into the air mingled with pine.

I stop for a food break and promptly get explored by ants. They find my encrusted salt sweat very tasty and are enjoying a good nibble. I myself on the other hand, am not enjoying it. The only way I can fend them off is by laying down a plastic sheet. I really could do with a half hour snooze, but these little blighters aren’t going to let that happen, short of me putting my tent up and hiding in it. If I put the tent up though, my day will end, so I stay unsnoozed. Oh well could be a lot lot worse. There’s no midges. That’s a definite definite bonus.

Some of the areas I have been passing through have a very similar feel to northern Finland; a place of high open plateaus spotted with sporadic pines and sparse grassland with an horizon of far flung mountains. Northern Finland though was midge and cleggie heaven. For the one or two days I was there (hitch hiking from the top of Norway) I utterly cowered and hid under anything whilst getting the quickest ride possible out of there to the south. It was awful beyond words. 

So Hokkaido; midge-free. At this time. In this place. I could live to regret this sentence.

Just before I encounter probably my last tunnel in Japan (goodbye Japanese tunnels! You’ve been strange! And scary!) I try out my snow hat theory. I am very hot. I pack some icy snow on my bald bonce. It’s cold. I slap a bit more on. It’s so cold it hurts. Intensely. My nerve-endings don’t know what to do with themselves. I can honestly say this is most genuinely mind-numbing experience I have ever had. Blood curdling even. I might even go so far as to call it spine-tingling. I would also say that it is a really bad idea. Do this for very long and I think something very weird might happen to me, and it wouldn’t be at all nice whatever it was.

Ditching the ice shock my nerve-endings do a rapid U-turn, and now the top of my head feels like it’s on fire. But not for long.

Through the tunnel I go, and not in the least like Robert McDougal it is too.

Unnamed village, where the 275 crosses the 239. South of Lake Shonarinai-ka.

Where I am camped tonight I am surrounded by four or five birds that a couple of nights ago I imagined were owls. I can’t see them, they only do their thing after dark. They have the oddest bird call I have ever heard in my life, including anything I ever saw on David Attenborough’s programs (except the liar bird which will mimic anything; camera clicks, car engines. Chainsaws…)

Its as if the call these birds here are making s copying the sound of a large bird swooping down to land. With a gurgling sink at the beginning and ends. Super weird. Anyway I have recorded it and mean to find out what these things are. Yesterday I saw a small wading bird with a long pointy beak make the same strange squelchy gurgling drain noise, so maybe this is what it is.

I wonder whether the call is meant to mimic the sound of a small animal squealing and then being arielly attacked by a predatory bird? There seem to be lot of incidences in nature of creatures pretending to be deadly, dead or just plain something else. Usually it’s a visual camouflage; maybe this is a sonic one.

May 22nd.

The highland moorland plateaus drop away gradually until I am surprised to find that I am back in rice growing country; this is the first area of paddis I have seen in Hokkaido. 

The nearer I get to Sapporo, the more I feel squeezed. Very soon I will be need into make actual decisions again, not my best skill. I can feel myself procrastinating, stopping for ages at the Sercomart, eating ice creams, reading a book, charging gizmos, putting off finishing the trip.

Endings for me are often somewhat bumpy landings. I will spend a week being anxious, not knowing what to do next. It’s like a weather front blowing in lots of gusty cold air. It gets a bit murky for a moment, and then that’s it. Blown over with a clear view ahead (he says hopefully…)

Currently I’ve got past the fact that I’m leaving Japan, that bit of mourning is done now I hope, and in a way, I’m glad it’s like that. It means I’ve had a really good time here. Now before me, it’s Russia. Or Australia. My brother in Perth is having a tough time and I want to see him. I also want to carry on my trip. Now I’m confused again. Ohhhhh!

The next couple of days I am primarily focussed on what happens after Japan. The 275 as it gets closer to Sapporo becomes busier with traffic and more full of lorries. 

Looking for a quiet camping spot away from the main road, I head up a small road at runs between a cleft between some lovely woodland. I am astonished when I see the biggest beetle I have ever seen in my life, a khaki monster four inches long staggering across the road. Whipping the camera out, I shoot a little video of him as he comes toward me. I move round. Closer to him for a proper close up. And then my camera falls on him and half squashes him.

Shit. I feel terrible. He feels worse. I pick him up, put him in the grass and stupidly apologising endlessly, hope that I haven’t totally ruined the rest of his existence. I feel such a monumental idiot. He was amazing. 

I put my tent up at the top of the hill, feeling bad. Not that that will help anything. All I can do is apologise to the gods.

In the night I wake up for a wee and something to eat. Turtling around with my head-torch on, it’s beam comes to rest on top of my tent. Plop! A tiny frog about an inch and a half long drops out of the birch tree I am under and sits in the little circle of light. I sit and watch him sitting there watching me. He is very lovely and I am not about to do anything dumb to him. I do take a picture of him which came out very lovely. He is quite happy sitting there looking at me.

I want it to be some kind of sign of forgiveness from the universe. Maybe it’s the universe telling me that it’s part of the life and death cycle… Seeing a cute little frog is cute anyway.

May25th. Numata.

The next morning I try to see if the beetle is where I put him. I don’t find him, and this tells me precisely nothing of course. Investigating the surrounding woods, it’s full of new and interesting plants to photograph and about thirty-odd little statues of Buddhas placed around the woodland.

Back to the road…

Still on the same road, the 275; it’s straight, it’s busy, I’ve got a full-on headwind. In a way I’m glad that the final part of my cycle run is relatively dull. Certainly makes it easier to move onto the next thing when I don’t have gorgeous empty mountain country enticing me to stay put!

Getting to Sapporo, I clean up slightly and head for the post office and retrieve my rucksack… Hello again rucksack old friend! Then to the Russian Consulate who tell me that the only place I can apply for a visa from is England. Oh.

Upon hearing this, I sit outside and decide that actually I’m not bothered by this as it just means that I can have a more summer-oriented bike trip from turkey back into Europe. It also means that visiting my brother in Australia will be less complicated and more leisurely if he’s up for it.

When we speak on Skype in the evening, he’s not up for a visit, he just needs to cut loose with his missus for now. Okay. That works for me too. More summer in the north; save Australia for when the European winter arrives.

Now it’s 10pm, I have no bike lights and I need to get down to the river and up tent.
May 26th. Camped back on the Ishikari-gawa River.

Apart from a five mile ride along the superb cycle path that runs alongside the vast nature reserve that fringes the great wide Ishikari-gawa, my time now is one devoted to head work rather than leg work. Organising myself for Mongolia and wherever after that, getting rid of excess stuff, posting things and getting properly properly washed for the first time in ages. It makes a nice change to be in the city; Sapporo, like all Japanese cities is vast and sprawling, but it does afford some good people watching. Who knows I might even go to an Imax cinema, hang out in a botanical garden and eat ice cream….

Saturday morning June 4th, Khaosan Hostel, Sapporo.

Gosh I’ve been here eight days already. 

My time has been spent zigzagging my way across the American-style grid that is Sapporo, chasing documents, information and snack lunches. My navigational abilities broaden daily with every excursion. Initial 45 minute journeys now take 20, I know where all the abandoned bikes are, where the nice leafy short cuts are (through the magnificent oasis of Hokkaido University, a piece of old Sapporo’s countryside preserved from the surrounding sky-scraping block city). I know where every Lawson Station, 7-11, Sercomart and Familymart is and which ones have electrical sockets I can use. I have fine-tuned my ability to negotiate traffic crossings. If I need to go twelve blocks north and seven blocks east, instead of merely waiting politely at every set of lights (at about four minutes per wait, it could easily take more than 30 minutes to go about a kilometre). My choice of either going north or east becomes determined by where the red lights aren’t, making even same destination repeat journeys ever varying.

I am camped up in a patch of reeds a couple of miles down river of the city, nearly all my stuff is in my permanently up tent. Weaving around traffic and everyone else becomes a nimble, flowing piece of bike riding pleasure.

The Joy Cafe is a source of comfy internet information gathering, endless free drinks and the use of a shower… Hot water! Oh wow! The first wash with hot water since Agra!!!

I tried the Russians for a visa. Despite the very cheery and voluptuous woman behind the counter at the consulate, ‘Ze komputer, eet zay nyet’. 

Too bald? Too sexy? Too stinky and unwashed?(I hadn’t found the Joy Cafe at this point).

No. Just not in England enough. Which is the only place they will issue me a visa from.

‘Oh.’

Says I standing there.

‘OK.’

Standing outside the consulate in the drizzle with the hood of my coat now up.

‘Oh. ‘

Again, just to make sure.

‘Now what?’

I had previously decided to myself that if the ol’ Ruski’s didn’t like the look of me, that it would only mean that I would get to be cycling through Europe through more summer sunshine, so it’s all good.

I discover that the Chinese will let me in visa-free for 72 or 144 hours depending where my onward flight to Mongolia passes through. This discovery evolves into me applying to the Consulate of The People’s Republic of China for a double entry transit visa, which, if my plan works out and nothing goes pear-shaped (hah!) I will get to overland it from Beijing to Ulan Baator, have my tourist thrills on the Mongolian Steppe, then overland my way to Kazakhstan via China again.

In theory this might happen. It all hangs on me being able to grasp daily reality in Chinese script, spoken word and ditto Cyrillic Mongolia. It could be a nightmare. More or less nobody speaks English in Japan, but at least there’s lots of English signs for places and ‘please do not stand on the toilet’. Still, I was anxious about India and I had a great time. I was anxious about Japan, and I’ve had a great time again. I can only presume that there’s a predictable pattern in all this. I am anxious about China, Mongolia and even more about Kazakhstan. I can only assume that it’s all going to be fantastic.

The Chinese consulate require me to have a phone number they can contact me on; it is impossible for me to put credit on my English sim card from abroad (because I didn’t register online from the UK), the Japanese won’t sell me a sim card for my phone (because I’m not Japanese- what the fuck?!) . my only other option is to book into the cheapest (and very nice) hostel I can find for four nights so the consulate can contact me if there is any problem processing my visa… So far no call. Good.

On my way out of town to go and pack up my tent and move into my new digs, I pass a likely looking chap operating a bike repair shack. A Japanese hippy guy with a tall bike (one bike frame welded above another for special giraffe-style cycling) I can see he’s the open minded sort. I ask him if he wants my bike. He looks at it and offers me 2000 yen. We talk a bit about how great bikes are and at the end of the conversation he hands me 5000 yen; slightly more than what I paid for the bikes front basket in Kagoshima. Not much in the scheme of things, but it settles at least one dilemma of what to do with the bike.

The day before I had picked up an abandoned folding bike, so tiny (10inch wheels!) it is more of a novelty toy item than a bike. (I later discover that its brand name is ‘The A Bike’ and is universally rated as being rather useless,)I mend the flat tyres, try it out. It does ride more or less. It’s a great design and I love it in some respects. It steers like a reluctant cow and makes my arms ache. It weighs about two kilos and folds up to almost nothing. If I was back home I would have kept it. 

After selling hippy bikes shack man my bike, I put the tiny ‘A-bike’ into the shopping basket of another abandoned bike that I had been passing every day coming in and out of the city. A single-geared thing in the style of a Dutch bike. Definitely abandoned; it has a rather buckled rear wheel that doesn’t want to go round. I jump up and down on it a bit, and now I have a bike for skimming round the city on until I catch my plane.

In a dorm with bunk beds. I’m on the tatami matted floor with a futon. Fresh clean white linen! I am so happy! As many hot showers and free tea as I like! YES! For an increasingly old man like me, this is probably as good as sex. I don’t know for certain; I think maybe I have forgotten what sex is like. Nice hostel though.

Spreading my stuff out for repacking from bike mode to rucksack mode, I seem to have brought with me a handful of ant stowaways. They are all wandering around, exploring this strange new world. Looking for dinner no doubt. Now that’s a good idea…

Today; either find my lost phone charger or buy a new one. plan my on going Asian route some more. There was a warning issued yesterday from UK HM Govt. about increasing terrorism in Turkey focussing more on western tourists. Hmm. Will think about that nearer the time.
June 7th same place.

The hostel is a very sweet place to unwind from two months of outdoorsness. Lovely unpretentious people from lots of places. Korea, Singapore, Edinburgh, Denmark. I’m sharing my dorm with a nice quiet Thai student dentist. It’s been a lovely chilled dorm to share, excepting tonight in the bunk above me is a rather rotund Polish chap who’s wholehearted snoring sounds like a train crash in a tunnel set on auto-repeat. Once again, I give holy praise to the God of Earplugs. Halleleiujah. Or however you spell it.

Yesterday I spent an astonishing and sanity-mangling seven hours talking online to Kobo customer care trying to rectify the fact that the Mongolian Lonely Planet eBook I had bought online in the morning appeared on my e-reader thing in Italian for no readily understandable reason. Seven hours to get it sorted. And I didn’t swear once. Truly, I am Superman’s little brother. What a waste of life. On top of that, I had extremely limited time to do potentially far more broad-spanning stuff like decide how I was going to get from Beijing to Kazakhstan. Fiddling hopelessly with a piddly little guide book was not on my list of things to do. Computers. I bloody hate them, life-enhancing and marvellous as they are.
On top of that, the last three days have consisted of me being chained to the internet trawling for information and trying my damnedest (and utterly failing) to buy online the required notorious and globally despised “ongoing ticket”. That great airport screw whereby you have to commit stupid amounts of probably non-returnable money of your own to some arbitrary exit from the country in such a way that probably bears no similarity to your own meandering less-than-firmly-decided route. After three days of computer screen my brain has turned to scrambled egg. A thoroughly decent young German chap called Mike came to my rescue and spent an entire afternoon carefully handcrafting me a bespokely photo-shopped ticket to Kuala Lumpa in an artisan fashion. Which I’m not going to obviously. There’s a possibility that I’ll get found out, and barred from entry to China, but currently I’m not worried. Nor would you be if the lethally combined efforts of Chinese and aviation bureaucracy had conspired to melt your thinking functions into half an English cooked breakfast. This time tomorrow night I will either be in sweaty stinky Beijing, or… I won’t. How exciting! 

Incidentally, I though rather cute that the usually annoying autocorrect on my tablet’s keyboard just turned ‘Kuala Lumpa’ into ‘Koala Lumps’. And yes, I did find my phone charger.

Tomorrow I kiss good bye to Japan. Japan’s been good to me. Endlessly beautiful, predictable in a nice way. Safe, sensibly proportioned in its thinking, yet also mad-as-toast. The only country I have ever been too where roadworks have large plastic pink rabbits and green teddy bears incorporated into its otherwise functional barriers. Where the paramedic ambulances and fire brigade rush through near empty town streets, sirens blaring to the rescue and moving along carefully at about fifteen miles an hour so as not to cause any further incident, apologising loudly via megaphone for being in the way to every car it trundles past. Strangely in keeping with the Japanese sensibility for entering places and meeting people in the ‘correct’ way, but otherwise totally absurd.

A country where its people are quite happy to eat great blobs of completely tasteless clear jelly and stinky-bum dogrot, which I now discover is called “natto”. Somebody cooked some in the hostel and the hostel kitchen stunk like hot stinky old socks.

I shall remember Japan for the wonderful politeness of its people, its total generosity towards cyclists, hundreds of little red and white funky mopeds delivering the mail. And its clean streets, its total lack of vandalism, flowerbeds in the cities. Children walking to school by themselves, safely. The list goes on, but I’m going to bed.