Baggaz and Woody have landed!
Once they recoup from jet lag and get quality cuddles from kin........ their story of cycling in a typhoon, hire cars, hotel beds and tourism shall be here for all of our delights!
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Day 9
Breakfast at the ryokan was quite western - toast, salad, some slightly spicy stewed apple soon with some slightly gloopy yoghurt. Maybe this ryokan appealed to the residents as a cool western type of place. I ate a lot of toast - I hadn't had any for 10 days. I also drank a lot of coffee. We packed up our now fairly dry things and headed out on the road once again into the light misty drizzle that we'd become familiar with. And once again we started with a big ascent into the cloud, although not as big as on some other days. It wasn't particularly warm though and we both had jackets on. The rain was becoming a bit annoying. When we were high up we couldn't see anything, it made braking harder on the downhills, it made us more likely to skid or come off in general and it reduced how visible we were to other traffic making it more likely that we'd get hit on these busy roads full of industrious traffic. It also made our luggage heavier, increased drag and was sapping mentally. We wouldn't be able to make it to Obihiro for the new bottom bracket in one day so our plan was to get to somewhere about 40k away from the city so that we could get up and get to the bike shop for when it opened at 10. Stuart's BB wasn't getting any looser at least. Coming down from the climb we came to a junction with a few shops. While parking the bikes I got chatting to a dapper older man wearing a cream linen suit and a dark brown mesh trilby. I couldn't work out why he was at this junction but he said he was waiting for a bus to take him back to the town where we'd just spent the night. He knew of the Ryokan. He said the usual message about the wet weather - that it was very unusual and can't be great for cycling in. He had a silver lapel pin of a bird - a swallow or swift. I asked him what it meant. He said that he was a member of the wild bird society of Japan, I asked if there'd been a meeting of the society today but be said not. We hadn't seen any swallows but he said that they do get them on Hokkaido. I told him we'd seen what I thought were juvenile Steller's sea eagles on the road north to Wakkanai and be smiled and nodded. We got some sushi bombs from the hot chef and sat against the side of the building, protected from the rain by an overhang. It was only as we were finishing that the bird man reappeared and said we could have sat in the bus stop waiting room if we'd preferred. The hot chef didn't do hot coffee so we rode a few hundred metres back up the road to a 7-11 store that did. We sat inside and spun out our drinks watching the rain and the trucks while looking at the maps. Japan's such a low crime country that it seems pretty safe to just lean one's bike against the wall of a shop and wander in to get stuff without locking it. I'd always take my bar bag in though as that contains more valuable things - money, passport etc. Even if we were going somewhere for a longer time we'd still leave our main panniers on - just lock them to the bikes and the bikes to each other. We headed out into the rain and resumed our journey. The road was very busy for a while as two main routes were on the same road. But then the routes separated. It was a very pleasant section - a short uphill followed by a long and wonderful descent along a fairly quiet road through a pine forest. There were two particularly interesting features to our descent. Firstly we passed a European bike touring couple going uphill. We were going too fast to bother stopping though. And secondly, it stopped raining! Suddenly the road was dry. It was such a rare delight to ride on a quiet country road in the sunshine going downhill. Then Stuart's bike developed a squeak. It wasn't clear where it was coming from but then we narrowed it down to the rear hub. The hubs were sealed but maybe all the wet road silt followed by the novel dry conditions had caused a problem. We stopped and be dribbled oil around the place generously. It seemed to work as the squeaking stopped after a few more miles of riding. It stayed dry as we approached the town of Ashoro where there's a palaeontology museum. We popped in for a quick look. Some of the local stone was formerly a Jurassic? seabed and there have been some great finds of an unusual creature that looked like a cross between a manatee and a hippo. I spoke to a guy at the counter who had studied fossil penguins in Dunedin. It was drizzling again when we left but the rain had stopped when we reached our planned stop in the town of Kamishihoro. It was pretty dusky as we rode about trying to find the campsite. Our lights aren't great - mine worse than Stuart's. More for being more visible in tunnels than for seeing with. The campsite was on a place called their air park. But there was no runway. There were a lot of simple houses in the town - like a military camp, so it might have previously had a military airbase. That was the night we were advised to leave the campsite due to flood risk. I've already written about that. Onsens contd.
The usual routine for an onsen is that you take off your shoes at the entrance to the building and put them in a locker or just on a shelf along with other people's shoes. . Then you use a vending machine to get your onsen ticket - ¥400 usually, which you then give to the receptionist. At the entrance to the onsen proper there are two openings - each with a curtain across the too part with some writing on. One curtain blue and one red. Blue for men. Through the curtain there's a changing area where you take off all your clothes and put them in a locker or basket. Ideally one has two towels - a larger one for drying oneself, which stays in the basket, and a smaller one for taking into the bathing area. We never had two towels - just a small one each, until I left mine behind at the Otaru riderhaus. For a while I made do with drying myself with a merino T-shirt which worked well but meant that I didn't have a smaller towel for taking in to the bathing area; until I stopped and bought one, for ¥129, from a fashion shop in a small town we were passing through. The smaller towel is a sort of symbolic modesty protector. It doesn't hide very much but people hold them so that they dangle over their genitals when walking about or sit with them on their lap when in a sauna. Entering the bathing area there's a row of cleaning points - a shower hose, a plastic stool, a mirror and usually big soap, shampoo and conditioner dispensers. The idea is that you sit down at one of these cleaning points and give yourself a thorough wash. At some Onsens they provide razors and pre-pasted toothbrushes but that was unusual. Having washed yourself you can then get in the hot bath. The temperature is about 40deg which feels quite hot when you first get in. Most people put their little towel on their head when sitting in the water. Most onsens also have an outdoor hot bath which must be great in winter. All but one onsen we went to had a sauna and many had dry and steam saunas. The sauna was the main place we'd go to see the weather forecast as most had TVs. The dry saunas were usually around 90deg so it was sometimes a bit of a challenge to stay in them long enough to get the full forecast. Many onsen also have cold baths. I don't know what temp they are but probably about 20deg so they feel colder than they are. One can spend as long as you want going between the different baths, the saunas and the soaping areas. They're peaceful places - not much conversation in the men's one at least, the lighting is subdued and there's the constant sound of running water. The worst bit was having to get changed back in to stinking cycling stuff afterwards. I wonder if Onsens help the Japanese have a more realistic idea of what normal bodies are like compared to the UK where children very rarely see a non-airbrushed naked body and sometimes grow up thinking they're sub-perfect in comparison. Baggaz: Night was fine - camped on dry ground next to a shop and police station. Need to see if we can get intel on roads situation.
We've made a hitchhiking sign. Offered a lift with the bikes to Obhiro in the back of a truck. Landscape services company I think. At least we should be able to hire a car from there to get to Sapporo, although the website says they don't have any cars available today... Woody: Just got wifi again, still stuck in our disused service station. Structure seems safe whilst around us gets battered by the typhoon
Baggaz: Mobile networks mostly down so couldn't contact before. We're still in Shimizu - a town we've got to know quite well now! Our plan is to try and hitch a lift with some truckers along the expressway which is thought to reopen tomorrow but bikes are banned so can't ride it! Woody: Failing hitching will try and get some form of transport Baggaz: : They've had helicopters, TV satellite trucks and people in helmets so it must be serious! ;-) Baggaz: We were supposed to be heading over a pass but the winds of typhoon 10 have been building so the pass has been closed. The road was closed at the rest stop so we stopped there and plead homelessness so they've let us camp in a disused part of the service station complex - an old shop. It's dry and we have our camping mats.
The winds are wild outside. They've never had conditions like this here before said one of the staff (who studied English at Stirling university for a month). The typhoon is big news here as it's very violent and has been behaving erratically. You can look it up on the web and see what you can find about wind speeds - hopefully they will drop soon in the Obihiro area. Frustrating........ We're keeping busy though. I'm darning a glove and Woody is improving his Japanese. These things pass over very quickly apparently so hopefully we'll be able to make a start early in the am. The staff (who have all retreated down the mountain other than the security guard) have been lovely and given us sweetcorn, sushi, rice crackers and coffee sachets. Day Zero!
The pregnant Parisian software engineer on the flight to Schipol hadn't been to Hokkaido but she had been to Honshu on a walking holiday. I asked the cabin crew if they had any spare cheese sandwiches and they seemed very keen to offload a few on me. At Schipol I waited for Stuart in the 'library' and ate cheese sandwiches. There weren't many books but there were some comfortable chairs and a baby grand piano that a succession of people seemed to be able to play very competently. Great things, all these public pianos that one sees about the place. Imagine they'd chosen public violins instead. Stuart arrived and we had a couple of beers while waiting for the flight. I was trying to think myself in to Japan time but that would have made it 4am and going to bed wasn't an option. The 11hr flight to Seoul was comfortable. I watched a Korean film called The Phone and all but the final 2 minutes of Batman vs Superman. The food was very good - I'd chosen a random selection of vegetarian meals and it seemed better than the main meals the others were getting. We changed planes at Seoul and had a few hours looking about the airport. There was a lot of entertainment - trad Korean musicians, a string 4tet playing easy listening classics and some people dressed up as medieval courtiers. And there were lots of shops. The man next to us on the flight to Sapporo lived in the city. I asked him about the weather by saying that I'd heard that a typhoon had been causing a bit of rain but was now fading. He said that a new typhoon was on its way and would be causing some more rain in a couple of days. A pattern we'd get unpleasantly used to. When we landed in Sapporo it was about 10pm local time. The bikes had arrived just fine and we trundled them along to look for the airport hotel. Once checked in, the room became a mechanics workshop as we unpacked and reassembled the bikes. Amazingly I managed to avoid getting chain oil on the carpet walls or bedding. One of the retaining spindles from Stuart's bike had become bent so I whacked it with the seat post of my bike which seemed to do the job. Once all assembled we headed off to find the airport onsen. It was just before midnight. It was a job to find the place but got it eventually and headed inside. A pattern we'd get more pleasantly used to. Woody: Morning, WiFi!! We are mid way on second last day, just stopped for hot chocolate before we climb yet another volcano in the rain.
Baggaz: Safe arrival at campsite. Looks like an old air force base. No one else here. We are going to walk into town to forage for food and an onsen. Did approx 80 miles today. Dry towards the end though just started raining again.
Baggaz: Well that was an interesting evening! The rain became very heavy as we walked in to town. When we were in the onsen I went in to the sauna to see if the weather forecast was on the TV. But there was no TV! Instead I asked the only other person in there what his thoughts were about the arrival of Number 10 typhoon which had been predicted as being very violent on a weblink that Yumi had sent me yesterday. He said that it would probably affect the area from some point tomorrow and asked where we were staying. I said 'the camp site' and his eyes widened a little. He explained that the river had already burst its banks and that the camp site was part of the flood plain. He said we might be fine but if we preferred we could stay in the community shelter. Woody had come into the sauna by this point and the three of us sat about, naked, discussing the options. We decided that we didn't like the possibility of being flooded out if our tents and quite liked the idea of the community shelter. When we were dressed he gave us a lift to the camp site, we quickly packed up our things and he put everything, bikes included, into his car and took us to the shelter which consisted of a lovely wooden beamed open sided structure in the town park. Not the sports hall I'd been expecting. There were a few guys at the shelter. They said it was fine for us to stay there - in tents or under the shelter. They asked us if we'd eaten and we said we hadn't but we're thinking about Hot Chef and they laughed. 'Let's go eat!' they said. So we locked up our stuff and followed them a block to this great little restaurant where they ordered a load of food and beers. Hiro (the guy from the sauna) explained that they were town officials. Hiro himself was a director at Japan Agriculture - dealing with dairy cattle in particular. A woman appeared who worked for the mayor and who spoke good English. She did most of the interpreting. They said they were grateful for having the opportunity to meet us and paid for all the food and drinks. Now we're back at the shelter. Woody's pitched his tent on the grass while I'm going to try to sleep with my bag and mat under the shelter itself. Night! Baggaz: We had breakfast at the hotel next to the campsite. We feasted on tempura octopus and all sorts of other stuff. They even had bread and strawberry jam! Then we packed up our gear dry, and heeded down the road. It turned out to be a long day -89 miles. Longer than expected as we got a bit lost - a road on the map didn't exist in reality. So it was virtually dark by the time we got to where we planned to stay, and then found that the whole campsite had been flooded by the lake. We put up our tents across the road - next to that of a Japanese bike tourist, and outside what looked like a park office. We wandered down the road, had an onsen and got a bowl of noodles in the onsen cafe - served by a wonderful older woman who showed us how to mix our soup with the noodle liquid..... which would have been useful if we'd ever wanted to know that. We went to the hotel next to the onsen to get a beer but there was no bar. They did however have a vending machine selling cans of gin and tonic so we got a pair of those and sat dimming and using their wifi until we were asked to leave. Then we went back to the tents and sat and chatted with the Japanese guy. He'd flown from Tokyo to Sapporo with his bike - a classic steel and leather machine called 'alps'. Overnight it rained again. |