To Yawatahama

Wow, so this is the first day we have had real internet since leaving Matsuyama. I'll break it up into individual days to make it more readable, but there won't be a lot of text.

So, we left Matsuyama bound for Uwajima, which was really quite a long way away. We had decided to see how far we got by noon, and figure out where to stay after that. On our way out of Dogo Onsen, we went through the shopping arcade as we usually did, but this time saw a rather interesting shop

It reads "Uguisu-ya". Uguisu is a small bird. Ya means shop. The large beetles? No idea.

It took a very long time to weave our way through the urban sprawl that is Matsuyama, and we didn't even get out of town until close to 9:30, even though we left around 7:30. So, finally climbing up the mountain just outside of town, we ran into a real o-henro (pilgrim). He was from Kyoto and biking his pilgrimage. We didn't get his name, so he is Henro-San

Henro-san. Smiling because he is going downhill.

Our goal was to avoid all the mountains and ride along the coast for most of the first part of the trip, a bit iffy since the weather had been forecasting rain all week, though we hadn't seen any. The result was a beautiful ride.

No mountains, yay!

Snake. Snake? SNAKE!

 So, we finally, and to turn inland to get to Yawatahama, the halfway point and our Plan B if something were to go wrong. It was already pretty late, as it took us so long to get out of town. The beginning was great, although the mountains really kicked our butts.

Beautiful park by a mountain stream. Most importantly, it had drinking water.

Some great little tunnels for bikes and pedestrians.

And then, finally, something went wrong. We had our first flat. Shikoku has a littering problem, relative to the rest of Japan. This means there are cans on the side of the road sometimes. Sumi managed to run over an exceptionally sharp one. So, we had to do some emergency roadside service.

Oh, right. THAT'S why she didn't go into surgery.

She did all right for her first time ever changing an inner tube. Unfortunately for us, the inner tubes I ordered (that matched the tire specs and were listed on the bike manufacturer's web site) were not the right size. They were a little bigger. Not too much, but enough to make it not fit well. We gave it a try anyway, hoping to get into town, but no luck. I ended up having to find the leak and patch it. We were very lucky it was just one small puncture. So we now have 4 spare tubes that aren't the right size, and the size we need is very non-standard. Great.

Well, with Sumi's bike up and running again, we limped into Yawatahama at around 3:30, pretty late to be finding a place to stay. We headed to the JR Station to look for the city information counter....to find that there wasn't one. This has never happened before. We looked around. I asked the guy at the ticket counter, who was able to give me a map with a bunch of local hotels. I called a hotel that I could see out the window of the station, Hotel New Toyo. The conversation started something like this:

Front Desk Woman: (in Japanese) Hello, Hotel New Toyo
Sean: (in Japanese) Hi, my Japanese is a bit so-so, can you speak English?
Front Desk Woman: (in Japanese) This is the Hotel New Toyo, how may I help you?
Sean: Um..

I loved how she completely ignored "can you speak English?". I guess that was my answer. The good news was, she was very good, both on the phone and in person, to speak slowly and clearly, so we had no trouble understanding what she was saying. We booked the room (it was the cheapest we'd stayed at the entire trip: $33/person), walked over, and all was good. She even gave our bikes their own parking spot in the parking lot! The down side was there was no internet (either in the room or via public wifi), but after all that had happened today, shower, dinner and bed was enough.

I'm embarrassed to say, dinner tasted awesome.

Don't judge me! You ride a few hundred miles over four days and walk by a McDonalds and not cave.

Tomorrow we pick up the second half of the ride to Uwajima along the coast. Rain in the forecast for the fifth day in a row.