Wakayama: Singing Mountain, Sweating Gaijin

It was time to put The Plan into motion.  We were newly outfitted with coats, as well as all of our luggage from our last few trips -- we had torn across Missouri and California, and now Japan was ours for the taking.  First up was Shikoku.  Oh, but first, a bit of fun and culinary exploration in O-Town:

Our guitarist, Sa-chan, rockin' with one of his many other bands, Kaze no utage.

Shikoku is the smallest of Japan’s four major islands (PROTIP: when biking across an entire anything, go with the smallest one).  It’s regarded as something of a backwater, with only small, regional airports and no real metropolis to speak of.  It’s famous for sudachi, which are like limes the size and shape of ping-pong balls, and for its particularly pork-fat-filled ramen.  It is also home to the storied 88-Temple Pilgrimage which religious types have walked, biked, or taken a tour bus for centuries, which means that Shikoku is rather used to weirdly-dressed, unshowered transients with a need for free campsites.  Though only a relatively small inland sea separates Shikoku from mainland Honshu, it is reachable only by ferry, by car, or by train from a pretty out-of-the-way (for us) terminal, so the first step would be to bike to the ferry terminal in Wakayama.

We packed up and (hours later) left for Wakayama, our bikes even heavier than the previous week through some trick of advanced physics.  Wakayama City lies at the bottom of the great peninsula on which Osaka was founded, some two hours-plus by train from our old house.  Sadly, 80 kilometers to the ferry terminal meant 8 hours of biking through urban sprawl, and believe you me,  it doesn’t come much sprawlier than Osaka prefecture.

Also, there was a whatever-the-fuck-this-is.

Gaijin guest star!

Another night free camping in a city park, and before much longer we were at the mountains.  We met up with our friend Jake, with whom we would be sharing the next few hundred kilometers and alcoholic beverages, at the ferry terminal.  Jake’s a seasoned bike traveler; he’s been in Japan for the past four years, and in that time he’s ridden the circumference of Shikoku (about 800 km in total) enough times to give us plenty of guidance on our trip.  He would go with us as far as the Shimanami Kaido, the great series of bridges that connected northwestern Shikoku to Honshu, where we would part ways.

The ferry brought us to Tokushima, a town that as quiet as it was disturbingly familiar, where we would begin our journey.  The air was cold and windy, and a light rain had begun to fall while we were napping on the ferry.  Jake led us through the mean (by which I mean unlit) streets of Tokushima while the rain and wind picked up, rendering us invisible to cars and the road invisible to us.  When we had gone barely 5 kilometers, stopping at a grocery store to pick up some produce that we would then carry for several weeks, we stumbled upon a quiet park that was bathed in the light of a nearby love hotel.  It was a wet, empty, desolate place, so we figured it would be perfect.  We ate, drank, and cooked pasta until the wee hours.  All said, a most auspicious start to our trip.