Tottori 2: People Who Get Ice Cream From Other People (Are the Luckiest People in the World)

Now I understand why Japan is considered to be some of the best bike touring out there.  Once you get past the mountains, it's nothing but beautiful coastline, cool breezes, and fresh seafood for days.

And the occasional winged harbinger of death.

Another unexpected discovery about Japan's least populated prefecture: the people are amazingly friendly.  From the day we crossed the state line, car windows were rolled down and arms outstretched with vitamin drinks, miniature cakes, or cans of coffee.  "がんばれ！" the people would urge us, or "ファイト！", literally "fight," meaning something like "gofightwin!"  While crouching outside yet another conbini, a man pulled up in a car, studied us sidelong, then entered the store.  He came back out in ten minutes with two ice cream cups, which he offered to us shyly, then drove away.

The greatest love of all is our love for ice cream.

Needless to say, nothing of the sort ever happened to us in the States.  We would occasionally get a friendly wave from a car window or a honk that we chose to interpret as encouraging, and at times passersby would stop to advise us how crazy we are (if you are tempted to advise us the same, please know that we already know), but not once were we given a present by California or Missouri townspeople.  Once in Shimane we were approached by a skinny older man who wanted us to flip through his folder of sheet music; as we read the titles appreciatively ("Light My Fire," "In the Jungle," "Me and Bobby McGee"), he sang a few bars of each song before taking the folder back, bowing, and returning to his car.  We've said before that Japanese people want foreigners to visit their country and then leave promptly, but damn, do they ever turn it out for visitors.

Tottori: Blame it on the Rain

When we biked across Missouri (more on this later), we kicked it in a primarily old-school fashion: though we carry iPod touches with us in case of an Angry Birds-related emergency, they were largely unneeded on the Katy Trail, which is exceedingly difficult to get lost on.

Missouri's Katy Trail, a.k.a. "Ol' No-Turns."

Likewise, our trip down the California coast (more on this, too) was relatively straightforward.  We did bring a couple of paper maps put out by Adventure Cycling, and these came in very handy: with a single glance at the elevation profile, we could be fully prepared for the climbs ahead by despairing for days in advance.

Not so with Japan.  The route we'd planned to take us to our WWOOF host's and then to a ferry port takes us through five prefectures and two major regions of Japan.  Short of carrying an atlas with us, there was no map that would show us the way, and certainly none that would point out the 7-11s and city parks.  So, iPods.

Between the Google Maps app and an array of online weather reports, we did it like true Millenials and used technology to keep ourselves informed on the road.  Each conbini we would pass on the road -- in the cities, they are thick on the ground, with three Family Marts within sight of each other, but in the hinterlands of Tottori they are precious indeed -- was an exercise in information-gathering.  We crouch on the concrete in front of the glass showing the porn mags, surreptitiously charging our electronics while we slurp down canned coffee and eat hard-boiled egg after hard-boiled egg, and we research.  How far until the next campsite, how likely is it we would have a mountain pass today, where's the nearest supermarket, what are the chances of rain?  Once we finish with our research, we pack up once more and hit the road, unless of course someone has written something somewhere on the internet, in which case we have another coffee.

There is no accurate way to measure how many hours we've spent right here or at one of a hundred identical conbinis, so I'll just conservatively estimate "a buhdillion."

After resting for a day in Tottori, a city known for its pears and its sand, we edged along the coast of the Sea of Japan (or as we would begin to refer to it after reaching Korea, "the Sea of Korea"), happy to be finished with mountains for awhile.  On the second day on the road, while stopping at a Lawson for our usual breakfast of yogurt, dried fruit, eggs, and coffee, we noticed that Yahoo weather predicted a 60% chance of rain for the following day.  The Japan Meteorological Association, usually a considerably more optimistic source, pegged it at 100%, but rated the accuracy of that prediction only a "B," meaning it had a 75% chance of being correct.  Both of these predicted the rain only growing heavier from the afternoon.  Weather.com predicted no rain at all.

Not to get too Andy Rooneyish (-esque?), but I've always found weather reports to be completely mystifying.  If a 50% chance of rain is predicted, then surely the meteorologists are right in either outcome, right?  I tend to assume that a 60% chance of rain means that it is certainly, 100% raining somewhere, just not necessarily where I'm standing at any particular time.

We woke up in the city park where we had camped at 5, and had everything packed by 7:30.  We were determined to make it to shelter before the rain started, or at least make it to another conbini in time for second breakfast.  The sky had grown gray and threatening by midday, but Providence led us to yet another Lawson for another cup of coffee and another bout of Interneting.  We had scarcely made it under the awning when the sky began to fall.  "Adequate rain gear" not having been on our packing list, we've been making do by wrapping ponchos around our loads and hoping for the best, a technique that works fine in light rain and gets our bodies and our stuff completely drenched in heavy rain.  This was heavy, too.

Another check of the weather reports.  Yahoo was pretty sure that it wasn't raining at the moment, but that it was due to pick up and fall through the afternoon.  The JMA concurred, as did Weather.com, a unique convergence of three darts on three separate dartboards.  Google Maps indicated a campground just a kilometer ahead of us, and considering the odds that the rain would keep up for the rest of the day and night, it seemed prudent to push through the rain and set up camp as quickly as possible.  Dripping wet, our glasses fogged and streaked, we arrived at the empty campsite and began hanging all of our possessions to dry under the shelter.  A shame that we couldn't make much progress on this day, we said, but at least we made it to cover before the rain got much heavier.




Before we could even break out our knitting, the rain had stopped.  "I'm sure it'll pick up again any minute," I said, keeping a smile of relief clamped on.  "It sure is a good thing we made it here, though it's a shame we missed this brief break in the rain!"

Needless to say, the rain had finished.  By 2 p.m., the sun had come out, leaving us to sit in our pajamas and mournfully watch our clothes and sleeping bags dry on the clothesline.  If we had waited at the Lawson for another cup of coffee, we would have missed the rain entirely, and could be halfway to Shimane already.

お台場公園キャンプ場, just across from the Daiei Road Station.  The first and only time we've been approached for a fee in an abandoned campsite, and at 1000 yen, completely reasonable.

The mysterious poor posture of the trees of the Tottori coast.

We learned what we had already known, the hard lesson we had learned a dozen times over: don't trust information you get from the Internet.

Hyogo to Tottori in Photos

The top of a hill, where we found an abandoned park that served us well for free camping and badly for the health of our shins.

This is the face that just climbed an 8% grade.  Not with her face, of course, but yeah.

This is the face of a guy holding a bike for a lady who had to pee.  Gentlemanly!

The sea would be just down this hill, with any luck.
SPOILER ALERT: IT WAS, AND THERE WERE NO MORE MOUNTAINS ANYWHERE EVER.

Jenn, Empress of the Desert

As mentioned in the last post, Jenn and I got in a lot of traveling in a relatively (read: insanely) short period of time, opting for an overnight trip to Funkytown Japan and a camping trip to Desert World in the same week.  Tottori, located on the sea of Japan, is actually the least populous prefecture in the country, with a population of just holy-cow-that's-a-lot-of-people.  We opted to spend our 36 hours there mostly in the prefectural capital, Tottori (imaginative people, the Japanese).

When I informed my coworkers, friends, and neighbors that we took a trip to Tottori, responses ranged from "...Huh," to "Really?  Tottori?" (they said the same thing about Tokushima, as it happens).  As always, it seems our travel destination calculations were flawless. Wikitravel, our go-to free, mostly accurate, and above all, free travel guide, opens its section on Tottori with a description of a bleak Japanese tragic novel about a desert town that imprisons visitors in an enormous sand pit and forces them to dig for their lives.  It then goes on to point out that Tottori's locals "are certainly friendly — and thoroughly unlikely to strand you at the bottom of a sand pit."  *Cue "Vacation" by The Go-Gos*

As long as we were cramming new experiences into as short a time as possible, we also opted to camp rather than pay for a hotel.  This was the first time that Jenn and I had done anything related to camping that doesn't involve the Rocky Horror Picture Show, so we were thrilled at all the possibilities that awaited us in the exciting field of sleeping out of doors.  What new bugs and/or poisonous plants would we discover in our sleeping bags?  I borrowed the necessary equipment from a coworker, promising that we would return it in pristine condition barring any unforeseen circumstances such as dirt.

On the first day of our trip, we fell out of the early-morning bus and promptly made plans to leave town: according to Wikitravel, in a nearby village was a beach that was made up of a special silica sand that, so the legends go, "sings" under one's feet on a hot day.  After the slowest train ride we've ever experienced in Japan (the train was ten whole minutes late, if you can believe such an atrocity) and an hour-long hike around twisting, pedestrian-hostile roads, we found our way to Idegahama Beach.  The sand, while pleasant, was remarkable in its resemblance to all other sand on the planet.  With one exception, that is: due to the sand's ultrafine nature, we are still turning it up in our shoes, pockets, suitcases, and hair.  No singing.

Thanks to another late train, we made it to our campground approximately an hour after the sun had gone down, so we proceeded to play my favorite game: Assemble an Unfamiliar Tent in the Dark.  I can only assume that we won, though I may have broken the rules when I frantically called the tent's owner and begged for help.

The next morning, we packed up our numerous heavy possessions and set off for Tottori Dunes, which our map claimed was adjacent to the campground. Indeed, just a short walk took us to the Western end of the Dunes.  Most of the attractions, including the largest dune and the guest center (including the restaurant and restrooms) were on the Eastern end.  Pay attention, there will be a quiz on this in a bit.

The Tottori Dunes, which are legally required to be described as either "majestic" or "mysterious," are Tottori's main tourist draw.  Tourists flock from across Japan and all over -- well, OK, just Japan, really -- to visit the Tottori Sand Dunes and...look at them, I guess.  They're good for looking at.  You can also get your picture taken while riding a camel, but we ruled out this option from the start; I established a firm "no camels" policy when Jenn and I first moved in together, and I see no reason to revisit it years later (unless camels have stopped being total fuckers at some point in the last 5 years).  So, no camels for us, then, but fortunately for we city-weary travelers, the Dunes also abutted the ocean, meaning one side of them was a lovely beach (this kind of undercut the Mystery of the Dunes for me).

So, finding ourselves at the edge of the Dunes, we decided to take what appeared to be a short hike down the dunes to the beach rather than make the long trek Eastward to the visitor's center.

Our spirits at the outset, as you can see, were high and glamorous.  The beach was only a quick 20 minute stumble down the huge mountains of sand.  When we got to the water's edge, where we planned to relax and plan out the rest of our day, we were shocked to see that the beach was all but abandoned.  What suckers, these Japanese tourists!  What were they thinking, paying huge sums of money to sit on a resentful pack animal and get their picture taken when there was beautiful nature right in front of them?

After a nice, leisurely swim, we packed up our possessions once again and set off to climb the dunes back to the bus stop, near where we had camped the night before.  It was right about then when the fatigue set in; as it turns out, it's considerably harder to climb UP an enormous mound of sand than to shuffle down it.  Within 10 minutes, we had expended all of our energy.  Within 20, we had finished the last of the water we brought.  After 25 minutes we had turned into every cliche of dying of thirst in the desert we had ever seen in the movies (you know, "go on without me, can't go on any longer," imagining each other with a hamburger for a head, etc.).  In all, it took us about an hour and a half to get back to the top of the hill. By the time we got back to the city center, we had earned sunburns that actually radiated 6 inches away from our bodies.  Deserts, it seemed, were not your average vacation spot for a reason.

At last, Pismo Beach!  And all the sand we can eat!

It will be a long, long time before we plan a vacation around the concept that there is a lot of sand somewhere.