The ferry across the Ariake Sea to Shimbara took about an hour, by design I was the last man on and the last man off the vessel. Mt. Unzen leered dauntingly over the city upon my arrival, as I prepped my bike for the road. I headed through the busy town’s high street and out…
Category: Travel
Okinawa : History & Beer
Naha 66 Miles My hostel in Naha was run down and grubby, carrying with it the feel of a random backpacker’s hostel plucked straight out of the back streets of somewhere in South East Asia. In fact, the city itself had a very different vibe to the Japanese mainland. Being one of the country’s poorest…
Yakushima: Land of the Giants
Yakushima 28 miles As my ferry from Kagoshima approached the Miyanoura harbour, I was greeted by some unusually clear skies, for in this part of the world – the locals will often joke – it rains 35 days of the month. The island’s topography consists of a wild and rugged interior, dominated by a number…
Journey to Sata – Act III
Minamiosumi – Kagoshima 88 miles A storm passed through during the night, bringing with it a heavy bout of rain, yet come morning there was little evidence left; the sun casually baked and dried up all traces of damp within its sight. Leaving camp at around 6:30 I convinced myself that I was getting used…
Journey to Sata – Act I
Miyakonojo – Kagoshima 52 miles It was a steady rise up into the Kirishima mountain range, away from Miyakonojo, where I would shortly cross into Kagoshima Prefecture. Gliding down toward Kagoshima Bay, which nuzzles itself in between the prefecture’s two peninsulas of Satsuma and Ōsumi – I saw the symbol of Kagoshima filling a triumphant…
The Puncture King of Miyazaki
Miyazaki – Miyakonojo 53 miles Regardless of the Japanese public’s diminishing attraction to Miyazaki, it’s most famed prize of past and present, is Aoshima to the city’s south. A small island measuring no more than 11 acres, it is surrounded in a delicate white sandy beach and interior jungle, which attracts a bulk of the…
The Legend of Pokémon Yellow
Kamae Oaza Kusumotoura – Miyazaki 91 miles A couple of trucks arrived late and left their noisy engines running, whilst a parade of drunk girls stumbled about in the car park, screaming and shouting, seemingly in search of some trucker cock. At around 4am, a man was outside my tent, chucking his guts up, it…
The Mountains, Yakisoba and the Hangover
Beppu – Kamae Oaza Kusumotoura 81 miles It had rained during the night, the ground still wet, stripping the atmosphere of its humidity. A temporary affair however, as by lunchtime the climes had scaled back up into the 30’s and I was beginning to feel quite sick. The previous night’s alcohol consumption clearly had not…
The Bloody Hells of Beppu
Shunan – Beppu 57 miles The early morning ferry across to Kyūshū was a bit of a bruiser: rustic, noisy and completely battered. Only myself and a small handful of other fellow humans would be risking passage to Oita Prefecture’s Kunisaki Peninsula – a remote area of farmland stemming down from the foothills of Mt….
Meeting the Locals of Miyajima
Hiroshima – Shunan 74 miles Typhoon Halong, which I had been bracing myself for, never made it to Hiroshima, a front of heavy rain passed, but a brunt of the storm passing up through Kyūshū and Shikoku, wound up heading east – colliding heavily with the Kii Peninsula where it would cause widespread damage to…
Tokyo to Tokyo 