As usual, the first day of our bike tour, started promisingly if far later in the day than we’d planned. The first leg of the day was an exercise in urban sprawl that carried us from the port ward of Osaka through the no-man’s-land between Osaka and Kobe. Caught between two metropolises, we spent an hour passing alleys, warehouses, bypasses and elevated highways: all the signs of a great city, but no people, no houses. Against our better judgment, we took our loaded bikes onto one of the expressways, the speedy if dangerous alternative to riding many kilometers out of our way to one of the few pedestrian bridges.
By midday, we had made it to Takarazuka. We have some history with this oddly Europe-y-looking city, having visited it twice to see performances by the all-female Takarazuka Revue. This bizarre institution puts on huge, lavish musical performances of Japanese and Western stories set to original (super unimpressive) music with all-female casts, and the performers who play the male roles have cultish followings among their female fans. We saw their performance of “Romeo and Juliet,” where two of the songs were titled “I am Scared” and “I am Tybalt,” just to give you some idea. Every show ends with all of the characters, even the ones who have died, returning to the stage in front of a row of lit-up stairs to do kicklines and sing for awhile longer. Some of them wear elephant-sized feathery cloaks. Sometimes there’s breakdancing. It’s amazing, is what I’m telling you.
Past Takarazuka it was up the mountains. These mountains were familiar to us as well: we had hiked through the abandoned train tunnels that wound their way through them last August. The mountain pass lost some of its charm when we were carrying all our worldly possessions, sadly.
Now, pushing our bikes up the endless slope, we found ourselves walking alongside an unending line of stopped cars. It seemed the Golden Week crowd was heading home after the first long weekend. The traffic continued for the next nine kilometers that we pushed, winding our way up and up and up. We kept reminding one another that, as thankless and tiresome and pushing was, at least we weren’t the poor schmucks stuck in traffic for four hours.
The sun sets faster in the mountains. Before long it was dark, and we took our bikes up onto the sidewalk for safety’s sake. On a dizzying series of switchbacks that cut their way up the darkening mountain, the parade of taillights glowing at our side, the sidewalk began to grow narrower and narrower. The railings on either side pressed us in, eventually getting both of our bikes stuck. We were able to squirm free eventually, but by then it had grown completely black.
There we were, at the top of a mountain (or probably not, as we had been figuring we were almost at the summit constantly for the previous three hours), with no plans for camping and no food except for pasta and a package of quick-cook lentils. Amazingly, we found a tiny neighborhood park there, just off the road, and we considered this offering from the Travel Gods. Should we free camp there, several kilometers before our intended goal for the day? On the one hand, the park was unlit, out of view of the road, and in a quiet neighborhood unlikely to have much late-night traffic, all of which meant good times for free camping. On the other hand, we didn’t have anything for the next day’s breakfast, and there was no bathroom in the park (which became much more important if we ate lentils for dinner).
Grimly, we decided to press on, and as we pushed uphill for another hour, we cursed our hubris at rejecting the Travel Gods’ blessing. Eventually, though, it seems we had passed Their test, as the slope finally turned downward, and we coasted right to the park where we had intended to camp after all, which proved to be right by that great spirit-lifer, a Lawson Station. We got our tent up just before it started raining.
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