Okayama – Naoshima 47 miles The morning started slow; my solitary rear mud guard and brakes annoyingly chaffed my rear tyre as I headed west, out of Okayama. Love diminished fast for mud guards on this trip, yes they repelled a certain amount of water and random street guff, but at the same time when…
Author: dsd_uk
Part time adventurer and full time slave to the wage.
The Black Crow of Okayama
23.Okayama 岡山県 Himeji – Okayama 56 miles The sky today was overcast, blocking out the sun’s keen intensity. There was still an element of stickiness to the day but, with the sun in hiding, it made my surge fourth into Okayama Prefecture all the more durable. Rural life was becoming a common sight again, after…
The White Heron of Himeji
Kobe – Himeji 52 miles By the time I’d readied my bike for the day, I was already a sweaty wreck; the dial again well on its way to another 37°C scorcher. Racing out of central Kobe toward the suburbs, I found the coast of the Seto Inland Sea, a predominately caged in body of…
The Keihanshin Jungle
Kyoto – Kobe 47 miles Plying the concrete jungles of the Keihanshin, the metropolitan region where Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe all meet, saw me exposed to a brutal 37°C heat. The sun beat down fiercely upon the road as its rays refracted upwards, giving a constant mirage effect. I found myself going through some 2…
Clammy in Kyoto
Kyoto I would awake with a hangover. Kyoto was only my second prolonged stop since Hokkaidō, some three months previously, and it acted as the perfect excuse for an absolute skinful. Arising out of bed, yawning like a barbarian and then groaning like a zombie, I stumbled from my hotel room and out onto a…
The Rave by the Lake : Aftermath
Nagahama – Kyoto 58 miles Boom, chicka-boom, chicka-boom… Come 7am and I was still wide awake. The same song continuously blasted away without remorse. I’d just experienced my first Japanese all-night rave and the Japanese themselves at their most unruly. On a plus note, I did manage to survive the night without getting my head…
The Rave by the Lake
Fukui – Nagahama 83 miles I awoke early to a selection of lurching footsteps, creeping around outside my tent. Fearing that I was about to get molested by the walking dead, I grabbed a pile of wits and chanced a sly glance through my tent’s involuntary secret peep hole. I was relieved to find that…
The Phoenix
19. Fukui Heading out of Kanazawa, I met up with my old flame, Route 8, as I journeyed into Fukui Prefecture. Route 8 was as feckless as ever, with its limited hard shoulders and hordes of trucks that bounced along the heavily fractured bitumen without a care in the world….
The Angry Warden and the Japanese Garden
Kanazawa – Fukui 60 miles After coffee and a high five, I left Jimmy and Lei to their Japanese studying; something that I was struggling to find the time to do. I had been averaging anywhere between 60-100 miles a day in the saddle, so the very thought of sitting down to study Japanese at…
One Thousand Rice Paddies
Mitsukejima – Kanazawa 111 miles I’d managed to survive the night without being coerced into any deep crevices; in fact, as I left surrounded by a spooky sea mist, I could hear my camping neighbour snoring contentedly. If I wasn’t so eager to push on, then I may well have been jealous of his sleeping…
Tokyo to Tokyo 