Day 5
Nasushiobara, Tochigi - Tajima, Fukushima

Distance: 82.90 km
Average: 20.3 km/h
Max: 59.2 km/h
Total Distance: 475.62 km

Due to the cold and rain I barely got any sleep this past night. I ended up spending close to four or five hours in my hammock just listening to music on my mp3 player. Finally once the sun started to rise and the rain stopped, I was able to get out of the hammock and pack up camp. After breaking camp, I headed back down to the bathroom overhang I had hung out at for a few hours the previous day and cooked some outmeal with added rasins for breakfast. It was delicious.

I was soon off on my way. I knew that the weather called for heavy rain again starting in the mid to late afternoon, so I decided to have an abbreviated day and only go about 50 or 60 km to the nearest city, Shimogo, Fukushima. On the map as the crow flies, I was only about 12 km away from the center of the city, but my chosen road was going to be a very, very windy prefectural highway that took me over a very mountainous area.

I headed off over the dam and continued down the road. I noticed that the only things anywhere in this area were the occasional electricity substation or small administrative outpost, which I assume to be because the dam is hydroelectric. After about six kilometers or so, there was one last substation, after which the previously up-until-now two-lane highway turned into a very skinny one-lane road. Well, ok, I suppose.

Continuing on for another few kilometers, I noticed two dirt road offshoots from the main road I was on, but I didn’t really read the signs. They actually were sentences/explanations that I didn’t feel important to read, as I knew that I wanted to continue on the highway (though now a one-lane path). Shortly thereafter, though, the road suddenly stopped, an “under construction” sign in the way. I looked down the road and sure enough, this is where the pavement ends. Everything beyond the sign was just torn up land.

So much for the highway that the map says runs all the way to the city. Also, this is where I’ll point out that I intentionally tried to map out my route for my whole trip to take what I thought would be lesser-used prefectural highways or even local roads. The end result of this was that yes, I did get more scenery and less trafic, but it was at the expense of having to go over many mountain ranges (versus many national highways that have lots of tunnels) and, in the case of today, the road suddenly ending.

Dejectedly, I went back a little bit and this time actually read the signs on the offshoots. I was able to decode most of what I thought it was trying to say and came to the conclusion that it might actually be a dirt road detour to get back to the highway. With that hope in my mind, I went down the dirt road.

You don’t really want to go down a dirt road (read: rock road) on a loaded touring bike. After a few kilometers of such, I decided that this was Not a Good Idea and turned back after consulting my map and pretending to confirm such. Though really, I didn’t have a very good idea as to what road was what on the map, and as my phone’s GPS isn’t true-blue GPS, I wasn’t able to use GPS.

I turned around, went back over the dirt/rock road, back on the single lane highway, back to the dam, and back down the mountains I road up the day before. I wasn’t very happy.

About the only thing that lifted my spirits while backtracking was when I was speeding down a mountain and came around a corner, only to see a monkey right in the middle of my lane. It saw me and quickly hopped off the road, just in time for me to not hit it, climbed up in a tree, and glared at me as I passed by. As I went further around the turn the same thing happened with one, two, three, four more monkeys.

I’ve almost hit lots of animals on the road, and I’ve seen lots of animals hit on the road. But that was the first time I was able to add monkeys to that list.

It ends up that the best detour was to head all the way back to a highway I had crossed the day before, which would then take me in the direction I wanted to go. All told, when you add up the distance I rode in vain on Days 4 and 5, that highway being closed added about 60 km to my trip. Yay.

This highway, National Highway 400, was the exact reason why I had done my best to not take national highways. While it was ok at first, as I got closer and closer to Shiobara, Tochigi, a very touristy onsen resort town, the highway lost all semblance of a shoulder. Compounded with the highway going from a four-lane to a two-lane road, the road winding through mountains, and the increased flow of cars in a city full of tourist busses and vehicles, it became a very scary road to try and bike on. There were many times when a large backlog of cars and busses would be up behind me and I’d have to wait until there was a turnoff/stopping area before I could pull over and let everyone pass. There was simply no room at all to pull over–just the road then a guard rail right on the edge of the lane.

Shiobara did look like a cool onsen city to stop in (and I did buy a bento and eat lunch there). Unfortunately it was far too crowded for my tastes, plus I knew I had to hurry and get to my destination and get shelter set up before the rain came.

Shiobara had lots of these cool cliffs, along with some other nice scenerey

One thing that’s obvious from the photo above, and as I mentioned earlier many times, there’s a lot of… mountains in Japan! Gasp! Also as mentioned above, this means that there are also lots of tunnels on highways.

I had a love-hate relationship with tunnels. On one hand, they allow you to go through mountains versus over them, a benefit which I believe is quite obvious, especially when you’re riding a bike. But on the unfortunate other hand, they’re scary as fuck.

You see, when you’re on the highways out in the boonies between cities, most people don’t bike or walk way out there, so the only sidewalks in tunnels are little emergency sidewalks with widths that are 12 to 18 inches… max. The road has no shoulder, and there is a curb that is a good eight or so inches. This oftentimes leads to a tough decision: take the sidewalk or take the road.

Would you take the sidewalk or the road?

For the most part when not in tunnels, I ride on the road, but the feeling of safety changes dramtically when in a long (most tunnels are about 800 meters - 1,500 meters), enclosed space where cars are speeding past you. Because of the enclosed space, even the smallest car is fucking loud and sounds like a semi, plus it because exponentially more difficult to place where vehicles are based on their sounds, not knowing if a car is way behind you or about to pass your ass.

Furthermore, cars, and to a much larger extent semis, create an air vortex as they pass by you. On the open highway this really is nothing, but in a tunnel this vortex likes to suck you towards the passing vehicle, which usually tends to pass you quite close. Once during this trip I was riding on a road in a tunnel and three semis passed me in quick succession. The resulting vortexes kept trying to suck me over and into the path of the next vehicle, to the point where my bike immediately began oscillating back and forth a few inches from the semis to almost smacking into the 8-inch curb. If I could choose one point on the trip where I was genuinly scared for my life, that would be it.

On the other hand, the sidewalk does alleviate some of these problems in that you don’t have to worry about traffic so much. But, you still have to worry about riding in a perfectly straight line on the sidewalk so you don’t run into the wall on one side or go over the curb on the other side, into traffic. This is made worse because (a) a loaded touring bike is slightly wider and noticeably heavier/harder to maneuver than an unloaded bike, (b) there are intermittent emergency kiosks with lights and stuff sticking out of the wall, and (c) many times the sidewalk was made out of two parallel sections with a slightly lip in between.

The problem with the lips is quite noticeable while using a road tire, and because it effectively splits an already-thin sidewalk in half, you end up having to choose the the half closest to the wall or the half closest to traffic. When I would try to cross the lip, more often than not it would catch my tires and make it hard to switch (needed for various reasons sometimes). There was one particular time where my wheel suddenly popped over the lip and I almost rode straight off the curb and into car speeding past. It wasn’t fun.

So in conclusion, I hated/loved tunnels.

ANYWAY, if you could take the above photo and turn around 180 degrees, you’d see this:

I went to Nikko!

If you actually know the geography for the region, you may be as surprised as I was that I ended up in Nikko, which I didn’t actually realize I would. In actuality, if you go to that Wikipedia link and look at the map of the city, you’ll see that I only just barely nipped that northeast corner of the city right before I passed into Fukushima Prefecture. While I was far away from the actual ‘real’ part of the city, it’s still cool that I officially went through it.

More riding ensued, and I eventually arrived at the little town of Tajima, Fukushima. It really only consists of one road–Highway 400. If you venture away from the highway the town ends mighty quickly.

By the time I arrived in Tajima, the weather was looking quite nasty, so I modified my original plans for the trip and came to the conclusion that I should take shelter in a hotel. The first hotel I went to was a slightly odd experience.

As I approached the building I noticed that there weren’t any lights on inside, but even though the sign looked old, everything else inside looked new and maintained. I tried my luck to see if the door was open, and to my surprise, it wasn’t locked. Happily, I went inside.

There was no clerk. There were no lights. There were no people. It was completely devoid of life. I yelled, waited, yelled some more, rang the bell, but no one came. Very odd.

I went back outside, thoroughly confused, and noticed that the region’s police headquarters was right across the street. Going inside, I asked the first guy I saw where the nearest hotel was. Obviously, he pointed at the one across the street. Once I explained to him what had just happened there, he became just as confused as I. Luckily for me, though, was that the town had two hotels, so he directed me to it.

I arrived and all was well, except for when I had to pay. The cost of a hotel hadn’t been factored in to the cash I was carrying, so I had to leave the hotel and ride about a kilometer to a 7-11 I had noticed earlier to use the ATM. To my great luck, it started pouring down rain the moment I went outside.

Returning back from that little adventure, I paid, the lady noticed I was in cycling clothes and asked what I was going to do with my bike, then she suggested that I bring it up out of the rain and place it in the lobby. Well, sure thing lady, I’d be happy. So in addition to me getting a room for the night, so did my bike.

Here’s one last thing before I conclude this longer-than-expected entry: the biggest VCR I’ve ever seen.

The giant pay-to-play VCR

That giant box the tiny TV is sitting on was the room’s VCR, which also happened to charge 300 yen to play a video (or 100 yen per 10 minutes to play Famicom). But wait, what tapes could you possibly want to pay 300 yen to play?

Bookshelf full of VHS porn

How about a bookcase full of old Japanese VHS porn? Despite how much desire I had to watch Vagina VS Vagina, I refrained from dropping the 300 yen in. I ended the day watching the Olympics and the sad, sad weather forecast for the following day.

It felt great to have a warm shower, a hot bath, and a warm, dry bed to sleep in.

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