The Road To Uwajima

Up early and ready to get going! We stopped at the nearby konbini and grabbed some breakfast, and found a great little park behind the store to eat breakfast in. It reminded me of all the things I loved about our old parks when I was a kid that have all been sanitized and child-proofed for, well, children. All the playground equipment was themed, metal and interesting, which of course means a little dangerous. There was no rubberized surfaces or plastic. It was sand, dirt and metal. Exactly what a playground should be.

Apple juice, yogurt and bread!

That, my friends, is a zip line. In a public park.

A jungle-gym ship!

So, after breakfast and a few rides on the zip line (OK, not really, though I kind of wanted to. I'm too big for everything in Japan, and explaining how I broke the poor city's zip line didn't sound appealing) we had two choices in getting to Uwajima. Take a major highway with no bike lane through the mountains for about 45km or take a tiny road along the coast for 75km. Sumi took one look at the mountains and said "coast!", so that's what we did. And it was worth it.

The coastline along the Uwa sea is dotted with small fishing villages that, in many ways, time forgot. You bike down a narrow one-and-a-half lane road along the coast, with a 300m sheer mountain face on your left and a 200m drop to the sea on your right (sometimes with a guardrail) for about 10km,

We had a guardrail this curve, so I felt a little better about leaning out to take a picture.

then you enter a small village where the buildings are built right up to the road, so opening your front door is a morning adventure if the delivery guy is running late. Some of the buildings pre-date WWII, and are classic, two-story wooden buildings with large, shuttered windows on the second floors. There were only a few elderly people out walking around, often giving it a odd, ghost town-like feel.

A more modern area of town

The road would take us up and down along the coast, sometimes inland just a little bit, where the vegetation got so dense, you felt like you were in a rain forest (the 100% humidity didn't hurt, either).

When trucks came by, we had to move into the bushes to let them through.

Another way the area felt like a land from another time was all the old artifacts of earlier days still around. The occasional bomb shelter was still standing, often covered in ivy or moss. Old signs from the 1960's were still up, sometimes by deserted buildings from the same time. Up in the mountains, there were lots of these:

motorized mini-train that carries supplies, and people, up the mountain.

These contraptions had to have been 50 years old, at least, yet there they were, most still in service.

FInally, the rain hit. It had been five days since the first storm was predicted, and we had seen nothing, but it came, at last, and we had several hours left to ride. At least it was a warm rain, so other than being soaked, we were in pretty good shape.

A pause in the rain to dry off. The stairs lead up from the village below. We were stopped at a bus stop. Villagers would climb over 100 steps up to the highway to catch the bus.

Finally arriving in Uwajima soaking wet after an 80km day and looking for the Youth Hostel we were staying at this evening (we still haven't been able to camp, with the threat of rain every day), we wove our way through tiny streets with no signs, and then a mile up a hill that was at least 300m and often at a 5+% grade to an old elementary school tucked in a forest in the mountain overlooking Uwajima that was turned into a Youth Hostel.

It was as cozy as it looks!

The proprietor was incredibly friendly and helpful. He apparently lived there with his kids and there were silly little things all over the hostel, like Hello Kitty towel hooks, Moomintroll stuffed animals, etc.  The private room we had was cozy, if a little odd

The room was huge, as it was part of a classroom at one point. The beds felt like adult cribs, but were comfortable enough.

After cleaning up, we headed into town(a good 20 minute walk) for some dinner and came across a shopping arcade, but everything was closed. Not abandoned, but closed for the day. It was a Thursday, with no visible holiday, at about 4:30pm. The arcade should have been bustling with people, but it was quiet and dark. We still don't know what was going on. We were so tired when we got back, we forgot to ask at the hostel.

The other attraction in Uwajima, other that the fertility shrine, is Bull Sumo. No, I'm not kidding.

The hostel had "wireless" if wireless meant you could surf the web like it was 1992. The speed was as close to dial-up as I had seen in many years. My e-mail took almost 5 minutes to check. I asked about an interent cafe, and there was one a few miles away. That was before May 3rd when it closed down, so there was effectively no internet in town. Great. I ended up making a poster in Photoshop using LogMeIn on my iPhone using my cellular connection to my home iMac, where Photoshop and the poster file were. That was fun.

Tomorrow, we head down to Nakamura for a ride along the Shimanto River. Another 80km day!

And some more random silliness from Japan:

They look so proud of themselves

Love the guy on the left rescuing a puppy with a helicopter. Can you imagine the US Army recruiting with South Park characters like this?

Be careful to them. They have done a lot of Tsunami awareness recently, for obvious reasons.

I feel bad that all I could think of when seeing this is the old Atari Pitfall.