Hyogo 2: Move Along

It had only been five days on the road, but we were beginning to get worn down.  We'd gone a wildly unimpressive number of kilometers so far, having met difficulties in the forms of hills, mountains, slopes, climbs, and rain.  Typically, after three days of biking, no matter how short the distance covered, our bodies start to complain more loudly than usual.  After four, important organs start shutting down.  After five, our morale dropped to zombie-like levels.  It was time for a rest.

This stuff will wear you out.

The day before had been particularly hard on us.  The nearest park was still many kilometers ahead over uncertain terrain, and the sun was starting to set.  The rain clouds started to gather above the sleepy town of Tamba, which lessened our resolve even further.  Surely we couldn't pay for a hotel room just four short days into our trip?  How would we afford to continue our travels until a job came through for us in August or September?  Gritting our teeth and trying to ignore the raindrops that fogged up our glasses, we made it to a conbini at the edge of town, a Lawson that offers the blessed tonic that is Free WiFi.  In my e-mail inbox, we discovered an urgent missive from one of the many stinging jellyfish job recruiters (I always get those confused somehow) that we'd gotten to help in our job hunt in Korea.  The e-mail explained that we'd landed a Skype interview with a prestigious academy in Seoul, but the only time it could be conducted was the following morning at 10 a.m..  Which meant that we had three options: we could ask to reschedule the interview for a later date, we could free camp nearby and conduct our interview in a conbini parking lot over a questionable internet connection...or we could pass a restful evening in a local hotel room and be showered and dressed for our interview.  The course seemed clear.  We fired off an enthusiastic confirmation to the jellyfish, then happily turned around and pedaled back into town in search of a hotel.  The Travel Gods seemed to be giving us the go-ahead, paving the way back to downtown Tamba with rainbows.

We paid the shockingly high hotel bill (about $130), then tried to console ourselves by catching up on our Game of Thrones and beer drinking.  The next morning, we were showered, polished, caffeinated, and prepped for our interview.

The shower was probably a good idea.

The recruiter sent us a confirmation early in the morning, and when 10:00 rolled around, we were signed into Skype and ready to kiss some ass.  By 10:30, we had started to grow restless, especially since we were already half an hour late for the hotel's check-out time.  We e-mailed our jellyfish and the school, explaining that we were ready to begin whenever they were.  More coffee cups were filled and emptied.  By 10:45, there was still no answer from anybody.  A few more desperate messages explaining the need for haste.

Harry started to get this expression again.

At 11:10, we could wait no longer, and frantically tore off our work clothes, packed our bags, and fled before we could be charged more money by the hotel.  We cursed the unprofessionalism of all parties involved and wondered how we could have so misinterpreted the universe's premonitions.  By the time we got back to the same fateful Lawson where all this had started, we had received an e-mail from the jellyfish.  He explained that he had set up our interview time without actually getting word from the school that the time he proposed would work for them in any way; he apologized, and asked if we could be ready the next morning at the same time.

This was the spirit that we carried with us as we pushed through the mountains of Hyogo.  Unrested, uneasy (but not unwashed, for a change), we made our way to an athletic park for a long lunch and a nap.

Thoroughly discouraged at how the day had gone, we decided to camp at a campground that Google promised us was just a few kilometers further, a place called 丹波少年自然の家.  We found the place with no problems, and we were ready for a good rest there.  It was a forest that had been converted into a campground and family recreation area, the kind of place where a school might take its students on an overnight trip.  There were rivers, fire pits, cabins, and extremely well-maintained kitchen areas and toilets.  Best of all, it was completely devoid of other customers.  Perhaps we could take a rest day here on the following day, even!

I made a good faith effort to register us at the camp office, but found all of the buildings suspiciously dark.  There did seem to be one office that was in business, with office ladies typing away at something, but considering how closed-looking everything was, I figured it would be best to make as little noise as possible, figuring that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.  As I hiked back to the tent sites where Jenn was watching our bikes, I watched in horror as a gang of ducks pursued and apparently raped a female duck that was waddling away from them as quick as she could, quacking in terror.  Ominous portents, to be sure, but I tried to pay them no mind.

By the time we had gotten our bags off of the bikes, a light truck pulled up and two Japanese men with clipboards approached us.  We smiled and greeted them even as our stomachs sank.

"Why didn't you come to the office and register?" one of the men asked.

Against my better judgment, my temper flared.  "I did, but nobody was there," I half-lied.

"Not the office right here, the one by the river."

"I did go there, but I didn't see anybody."  My mind flew back to the previous day, when a hotel clerk had fallen all over himself explaining how his hotel really wasn't suitable for us, that the other hotel in town was much better and we'd be much happier there.  I thought of all of the officials who'd just made the "no" sign rather than try speaking to me.  I got my gaijin up, in short.

"You can't camp here," one of them explained.

"What, really?"

"Yes.  We're closed, you can't camp here."

"Why was the gate open?  Why isn't it posted anywhere that you're not open?" I protested.  Jenn urged me to leave it alone, but I persisted, pigheadedly.  "There's all of this space, why can't we just set up here?  We'd pay, of course."

They both shook their heads.  I huffed and puffed, then petulantly asked if they knew of any other campgrounds in the area where our money would be more welcome.  They both pretended to think just long enough for us to give up and start packing up again.

Anger fueled us for another fifteen kilometers.  We railed against the stupidity of spending a fortune converting perfectly good forest into a campground, paying a staff of dozens to maintain it and keep the electricity running, then keeping away paying customers.  We could come up with few explanations other than out-and-out racism, figuring that a young Japanese couple would probably not be turned away so roughly (but then, a young Japanese couple probably wouldn't try it in the first place, nor would they act so belligerent when confronted).  Clearly it was a mistake to try to camp at an officially-sanctioned site in Japan; it was much better to break the law and camp in a city park.  Even if a campsite would lose money by turning us away, a much greater infraction would be asking one of the staff to overlook the rules by allowing us to stay.

We did find another park to camp, one much farther up the road.  It, too, was clearly closed for business, but it seemed much more abandoned than the last, the weeds grown over its benches and gazebos.  We set up in a gravel lot as the sun went down, hoping that the glowing eyes we saw in the woods were not bears but tanooki, and well-fed ones at that.

Shimanami Kaido: Road to Somewhere

After a leisurely (slow) six days of riding and resting our way across the northern coast of Shikoku, we abruptly realized that our plans might have to undergo yet another change.  Having given ourselves only three weeks to tour the entire coast of the island before getting back to Kansai for birthday parties and WWOOFing, we had a choice to make: either we could attempt to increase our pace, covering at least 80 kilometers a day for the next two weeks with precious few rest days, or we could alter our plans to include taking a bus from Matsuyama to the southern coast of blah blah blah anyway we decided not to do that either.

Just before speeding off in a cloud of dust and cigarette smoke, Jake recommended that we check out the Shimanami Kaido while on Shikoku; the Shimanami Kaido is a series of bridges that connects Shikoku to mainland Honshu via a handful of islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.  Jake told us that the Kaido was the main reason he wanted to revisit this part of the country by bike, and that we really shouldn’t miss it.  We decided to spend a day taking in some of the 76-kilometer route, maybe camp on one of the islands, then return to Shikoku for more stalling a decision about our route.

The ride, as promised, was gorgeous.  By now the sakura were in full bloom, and Shikoku being so rural a place, gorgeous copses of white-pink sakura were surrounded by natural beauty and mountains rather than by passed-out salarymen vomiting in the bushes (to which we had been accustomed after three hanami seasons in Osaka).

After a good day and a half of riding, we found ourselves going up the ramp to the first bridge of the Kaido.  It really is a miracle of engineering, this system of bridges, as well as a miracle of foresight that it’s all extremely bike-friendly.  Physics, unfortunately, remains less bike-friendly, requiring that we pedal up a slight incline for several kilometers before actually finding ourselves atop each bridge.

The superlative of the day is "First Three Consecutive Suspension Bridges in the World."

Having taken a little more time and energy climbing the first bridge than we had hoped, we found ourselves on the first major island, Oshima (literally, “Big Island”) just as the sun was going down.  This chain of volcanic islands tends to be a bit hilly, so we had reached a state of being extremely tuckered out by 5:00.  We could either venture still further into the island, which for all we knew would require climbing spikes and, hopefully, an elevator, or we could look for somewhere to free camp again.  As previously mentioned, we’re slightly less afraid to free camp in Japan due to the culture of hospitality and also not having any guns, but on a mountain road on a rural island, vacant lots and parks are a little hard to come by.

At last we stumbled across a building marked as a “cycle oasis.”  Among its promised amenities were “water,” “air pumps,” and “goats.”  I assumed I must have been hallucinating by this point, but decided it couldn’t hurt to ask the proprietor if there was a nearby park in which we could squat for the night.

Jenn hung back to watch the bikes while I knocked on the door of the bizarrely unfinished-looking wooden building.  I slid open the front door and, as though I had entered a saloon in the Old West, all conversation stopped, and there were twenty pairs of eyes on me.

“Um...are you open?” I asked hesitantly.

“Eh?” asked one of the old guys standing around the table.  It seemed there was some manner of party going on -- children, obachans, and old guys were seated around a grill that was covered with fish and stock pots.  The man approached, and I attempted to explain our situation, finally getting out that we were looking for a nearby park or campground.  The man frowned, shook his head, and explained that there weren’t any campgrounds on the island as far as he knew, but that we could stay right there on his property.

Stunned at this show of generosity (and pretty certain we were misunderstanding something), Jenn and I followed our host around the house, bowing all the while, where we were told we could set up right next to the goats.

Eh.  I've had worse roommates.

Two boys who were hanging around enthusiastically helped us set up our tent, and through them we got some kind of intelligence about where we were, exactly.  It seemed that this old wooden house, covered with barbed-wire spiderwebs and rusted bicycles, was a cram school, of all things.  Also, they reassured us that the goats probably wouldn’t eat our tent, though Daddy Goat seemed pretty determined to try.

On our host’s urging, we came in to join the party for a drink.  We met a whole slew of interesting characters, including a gaggle of middle schoolers, a standard Old Drunk Guy who spent a great deal of time talking about “Tom & Jerry,” and a man who had spent ten years traveling the world with his wife on a tandem bike.  The food was plentiful and delicious: grilled mackerel, pickles, garlic toast, and an immense pot of wild boar stew.  When we asked what the occasion was, someone explained, "We were hungry."  Between bouts of explaining our travel experiences and discussing the foibles of English teaching in Japan, we patted ourselves on the back for how our day had gone, thrilled that once again we had discovered some of the best of Japan off the beaten path.

Things took a bit of a darker turn once Old Drunk Guy started talking about international affairs, however.  I’m still not too clear on all that he said, but I’m sure that he said that he hates North and South Korea equally, that he thinks Japan should go to war with them again, that Latin America is full of disgusting mixed-blood people, and “Tora, tora, tora.”  The room grew quiet.  We’d always heard of this side of Japan, that nationalism lurks in many of this peaceful country’s social corners, though this was the first time we’d encountered it firsthand.  Voice shaking, I managed to get ODG back onto the topic of cartoons, and the room relaxed somewhat.

We retired to our tent long before the party had ended.  This day we had, without a doubt, seen some of the best of Japan and the Japanese, and just a glimpse of the worst as well.