Sado Island 77 miles An evening boat would take me to Sado, some 30 miles west off the coast of Niigata. I’d arrived in darkness and quickly found myself an unkempt stretch of coastal parkland to set up camp. Sado is a place with a morose history, and that’s even before you consider the slave…
Tag: Bicycle Touring
Summer Time in Snow Country
Agano – Sado Island 41 miles The skies were clear first thing and the day was already well on its way to becoming hot. Instead of heading directly to Niigata, I took a bit of a detour further into the depths of the prefecture’s lush agricultural heartland. For a prefecture that prides itself on having…
Rice is Nice
Yunohama – Agano 85 miles Entering Niigata Prefecture meant that I was officially leaving Tōhoku, the north of Honshū behind, and saying a hearty ‘Hello’ to the Chūbu Region, Central Honshū. Niigata is a prefecture that prides itself on producing some of the best grades of rice in all of Japan, its output of rice…
The Search for the Living Dead: Part 2
Sakata – Yunohama 70 miles ‘I saw the mummy when I was a boy,’ declared Akira. ‘What???’ I said, nearly spitting my marmalade toast into his face. ‘Doko?’ where? ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said standing up and collecting our plates. And that was it, I swear he could tell that I was…
Hokkaido Summer: Wild is the Wind
Higashimokoto – Abashiri 71 miles The road out of Highashimokoto continued in the same hilly prevalence from where it had left off yesterday. Yet the rise and fall of the landscape would today be the least of my concerns. As a far more brutally sinister enemy raged from the east, an enemy cruel and merciless,…
Touring the Sanriku Coast – II
12/04/2014 Ishinomaki – Minamisanriku Today would be a deplorable mess with some half-arsed personal planning doused in a contingent of anti-social roads. Traipsing the Oshiku Peninsula regrettable. Situated just 45 miles away the Peninsula makes it the closest part of Honshu to the epicentre of the 2011 quake and again would make this one of…
Tokyo to Tokyo 