Travel Day

Our goal is the resort town of Ibusuki, but with rain in the forecast, and Ibusuki being just a little far for one day through mountains (66 miles), we decided on a short day of biking to avoid the rain, do laundry, etc. This took us along the coast to the town of Minamisatsuma. The coast was very busy, with lots of vehicles going up and down the road. The road itself did not have a lot of room, as it was a cliff on one side and the ocean on the other, so this was not one of the more pleasant rides. The coast was nice, though, even with the overcast conditions

Those clouds are the rain we are riding into

We quickly turned off the main road into the mountains to avoid the heavy traffic and spent the next four hours working our way through the wilderness towards Minamisatsuma. This became a race against time, as climbing mountains is slow business and the rain was nipping at our heels. The route was once again beautiful, with small mountain roads surrounded by forest, but we were so focused on beating the weather, we didn't take any additional pictures.

We rolled into Minamisatsuma a little after noon with the rain just starting to come down. Our hotel de jour, the Sunstay Kaseda, had a check in time of 3:00pm, so we have a few hours to kill before our room would be ready. So we dropped our luggage at the front desk, parked our bikes in the back, said goodbye to the hotel's cockatiel, who seemed very interested in the guests, and walked to the nearest place that we could squat for a few hours without being kicked out: McDonalds. Free wi-fi, fast food, and a roof was the order of the day, and we got somewhat caught up with emails and blogs until we could check in.

The rest of the day was quite boring: laundry, cleaning, etc in preparation for our ride into Ibusuki tomorrow.

We should probably have planned better...

The ferry to take us to Nagashima departed at 6:40, so we were up a little before then and pedaled our way to the harbor, bought the tickets, and sat back for a quick, 30 minute ferry ride. It was pretty deserted this early in the morning.

All lashed to the side and ready for the high seas!

Sunrise...well, morning anyway

Quiet is good, especially when you bring your own pillow and blanket

The ride was quite nice. Beautiful scenery as we wove through a few islands to Nagashima. Arriving at Nagashima, we saw the coast almost completely covered in trees and sand.

Approaching the port

A shrine waaay up into the mountain.

One of the side effects of a beautiful coastline was that we had to ride up in the ridges. This was a good long ways up. And down. And up. And down. Five separate times, if I counted correctly, we had to climb a small mountain, then descend. The landscape was gorgeous.

This guy greeted us at the entrance to the Nagashima Tumulus Park

Statues made out of leaves dotted the roadsides

As well as Roadside Stations, like The Potato House

It was beautiful, but exhausting. The roads were fine, but constant traffic, as there is only one way around the island. We were glad to finally reach the bridge back to the main island of Kyuushuu. We had read it was like the Shimanami Kaidou that we had ridden into Shikoku, a stunning array of bridges with whole levels dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists, so we were hoping for a more pleasant ride off of Nagashima.

Expectation, not achieved

It may be hard to see in the picture, but the walking lanes on the sides of the bridge were almost wide enough for a bike and a person. The bridge wasn't that long, probably a quarter of a mile, but we were forced to walk our bikes, trying not to bang them on the guardrail, and hope fervently that no one tried walking the other direction, because there was no room to maneuver, no way to pass, and a long way back for someone if that happened. Thankfully, no one else was dumb enough to walk across the bridge, so we made it in one go. The road on the other side was also not very bike friendly, and we looked quickly for a way off the main road, using Navi's back roads filter to find us a path. And Navi did a good job. The resulting route was definitely not on main roads.

Now, from here until we finally make it into the outskirts of Satsumasendai, our destination for the night, there are almost no pictures. Imagine, dear readers, quiet, one lane mountain roads winding their way through thick forests. Miles and miles of no cars, no people, just trees, mountains, and two Americans gasping and panting their way up a 300m mountain, then a 590m mountain. For the better part of twenty miles, we were pretty much alone. This is usually a good thing. However, as the day wore on, and we got progressively more tired, we realized that we hadn't eaten a real meal since Tuesday, had no breakfast today (the ferry store was not open), and were climbing our fifth mountain of the day, were almost out of water and had finished our stash of granola bars. Sumi was stopping every 400m or so on our last climb (which was 500m in height over the course of several miles), and we were feeling pretty awful. In our defense, we didn't expect Nagashima to be so difficult, nor for the main road to be so bad on this side, so we didn't think of packing extra water and food, outside of our usual water bottles. So, pictures were not taken, and we spent the last several miles of that route looking for any sign of a vending machine.

Finally, after cresting the mountain and working our way slowly back down the mountain (the roads were steep, littered with leaves, and winding), we emerged into what looked like the outskirts of a town, and shortly after:

Cue angelic choir music here

There was a very nice Shinto shrine across the street, sitting in the shade of the mountain, that made a perfect rest stop.

So, hydrated, but still pretty undernourished, we made decent time into Satsumasendai, checked into our hotel, Tentoku. It was really nothing to look at on the outside, and the doorways and hallways were so narrow, I barely fit through them, but the room was spacious and clean. We were the only guests in the building we stayed in, so we had all the shared facilities to ourselves. We cleaned ourselves up, then set out to the real reason we were staying in Satsumasendai. The whole purpose of our trip here. The goal, if you will, of our five mountain journey and the thought of which kept us plodding along as the day wore on:

That's right, CoCo Curry House salads and...

Vegetable and Chicken curries

Now, I'm not going to say the ONLY reason we booked a hotel here was because it had the only CoCo Curry House in a fifty mile radius. But it helped. A lot. OK, maybe it WAS the only reason we chose to stay here. Totally worth it. Especially as it was our first real meal in several days after two days of rather intense cycling. It tasted amazing.

Finally full and feeling almost normal, we waddled our way back to Tentoku for some much needed sleep.

Around Amakusa Island

Up and eager to get going, we left at about six to start our trip. We were planning on getting in a good 50 miles today, and were going to make it around most of the island. There were a few landmarks we had read about, and we wanted to stop and take a look as we worked our way around the island.

Leaving the Hondo area, we quickly came across what would be a pretty representative view of the region.

Wow.

It was pretty overcast, but very pleasant, with temperatures in the sixties. We headed up to the northern coast looking for Oppai Iwa, which translates to "Boob Rock". Now this isn't some new, bouncy pop genre, it's a large rock shaped, well, like a breast. How is this a government-sanctioned landmark, you may ask? Well, we did too, but out of curiosity, and because it was on the way to our first real stop, we took a look.

The coast along the north side of the island is filled with basalt and old lava flows. The rocks are very hard up here, and at low tide, you can walk out quite a ways.

Nope, no boobs over here

Not here, either. Cool view, though.

This...is it?

I actually felt sorry for Japanese sailors, if this is the best they had. And I wondered again at the town of Reihoku and how slim their pickings were if this ended up on the tourism literature. Well, at least walking out at low tide was nice.

Our next (first) stop was to visit the ruins of Tomioka Castle, perched high on a bluff on the northwest tip of the island. Built in 1602, this was considered a stronghold of the Shogunate, as the terrain (bluffs and ocean on three sides) and the very narrow strip of land connecting Tomioka to the rest of Amakusa, made it incredibly defensible. We dropped our bikes off at the base of the slope, and hiked up to the keep.

Entrance to the park where the castle resides

Base of the stairs leading up to the Inari shrine. It's a long ways up.

Our walk spiraling around and up to the castle

Sumi at the top of the bluff

A view from the back of the main keep

There were four large statues in the courtyard, commemorating some Very Important Men from the time the castle was built. One of them was a scholar, Rai San'yo that wrote Nihon Gaishi, in all it's heavily biased glory. He was also one of the main influencers in a school of thought that became Japan's über-nationalist streak that would cause a few problems in the early-mid 20th century. Good job, man.

Very Important Men. You can tell by the sword.

An interesting compass stone that shows, to my surprise, that Tomioka is closer to Shanghai than it is to Tokyo

The Inari shrine at the base of the castle

A view of the castle from the entrance to the park

The road along the west coast turned out to be heavily used by trucks and was fairly loud and unpleasant biking. Sumi had downloaded a new Japanese navigation app, Navi, that has a cool feature that allows you to specify what type of course you want. We put in our destination (Ushibuka) and asked for back roads. As we have learned many times in Japan: Be careful what you wish for.

This is a road?

Highway 293. One lane, moss growing down the middle

A big mountain

Beautiful landscape

The route Navi chose for us was a road that was little more than a pathway that led up into the center of the island, over several mountains. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was waaaaay more than we expected to be doing on our first day. By the time we hit the coast again, we were pretty exhausted, but still had a few hours to go before finally arriving in Ushibuka, a small town on the southern tip of Amakusa.

The coast was lined with other islands along the archipelago

Ushibuka. A Happening Place.

Ushibuka is a nice little town. It is split into three distinct sections by the water, and all are connected by a very large bridge system. We crossed the mile-long bridge to our ryoukan this evening, Sunset

A view from one of the bridge sections

 After cleaning up, we quickly made our way into town to find some dinner. The very nice woman who ran the ryoukan was making some just awful-smelling fish dish that we didn't want to have to politely decline. As we left, she gave us a flyer containing many restaurants in the town. All of them, understandably, specialize in fish. Great.

Long time readers of our blog know that I don't eat fish. This is a defense mechanism, really. When I eat seafood, I tend to throw up, which I find counterproductive to eating, and so I avoid it at all costs. There is a lot of Japanese food that is not fish or seafood, but most of it has some hidden in it. In any case, there was an odd-sounding Italian restaurant "Big Mama Gon", and a chain restaurant "Hotto Motto", both about a mile or so away from Sunset. We checked out Big Mama Gon. It was closed un til 6:30 (we were there at 6) and looked...odd. My guess it it was more of a lounge that served some Italian food. Too hungry to wait 30 more minutes on the chance the food was reasonable, we headed over to Hotto Motto. This particular store was a carry-out only place located next to a pachinko parlor. Imagine a diner next to a dive bar whose customers are almost always drunks at 3am.

At this point, we were hungry and tired, and not interested in taking a chance on local cuisine, so we punted. We headed to the local Daily Yamazaki, a convenience store chain, and made a feast out of what appeared palatable.

Crustless ham sandwiches, mini-salad, yogurt, apple juice, green beans and a suspicious looking pasta and egg salad that Sumi was brave enough to try. The ambiance could've used a little work.

Dessert! Crunky makes good ice cream sandwiched and bars. The mint chip is excellent. Plus, you don't get a better name than Crunky.

After our zero-star meal, we headed back to Sunset, ironically at sunset.

Luckily, the owner didn't ask us how our meal was. There were a lot of new guests that she was helping, so we were able to sneak upstairs without too much conversation. Exhausted, we collapsed, but looking forward to our trip around Nagashima, the next island, and finally onto Kyuushuu.

It's Kumamoto da-mon!

The last time we were in Kumamoto, we were visiting the castle when Sumi badly sprained BOTH of her ankles while climbing down the steep steps of the main castle. The rest of the trip in Kyuushuu, she basically hobbled along, too stubborn to give up precious vacation time in Japan for something as trivial as catastrophic injury.

This time, I made her promise not to hurt herself until near the end of the trip. So far so good.

The ride to Kumamoto was quick and quiet, and when we arrived, we had several hours to kill before the bus that would take us to Amakusa Island was due to leave. The train station was about a mile or so south of the bus terminal and castle grounds, so we decided to walk up to the castle, as we only had our backpacks with us. Kumamoto town is a nice, clean city with lots of local flavor. Buses and light rail with brightly painted cars, riverwalks, and or course, the city mascot Kumamon

At the train station

Playing handball

Kumamon is somewhat of a cultural icon, having been voted the most popular yuru-chara, (area mascot) in the country in 2011. He was designed in 2010 to boost tourism. Whether he did that or not, I don't know, but merchandise sales of Kumamon products exceed that of nearly all other mascots combined, so he did accomplish something. He is so popular here in Kumamoto, many homes can be seen with Kumamon planters (just his head) and other small decorations. He is, quite literally, everywhere around here. Incidentally, the above posters are promoting two big sporting events being hosted by Kumamoto this year, the Rugby World Cup and the 2019 Female Handball Championships. Both pretty big events in these here parts.

Arriving at the bus terminal, we purchased our tickets, dropped our bags in a coin locker, and headed up to Kumamoto Castle. We remembered it as an impressive castle, and were eager to see it with Sumi having use of both her legs.

It is an impressive structure

That was hit hard by an earthquake...

In April of 2016, there was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit directly under the city, causing over 50 deaths and roughly 5 billion dollars in damage. The castle sustained structural damage to several of the main buildings roofs and walls. The entire castle is still closed down as they work to repair the damage.

Repairing the castle is expected to take several decades. Because the construction was done hundreds of years ago with no cement or any other kind of fitting, every stone is being numbered, cataloged, and sorted so it can be put together again in the exact same manner as it was initially constructed. They are also taking this opportunity to add an access elevator and other improvements. Parts of the castle will be opened during this time to tourists.

Well, since we couldn't climb the castle steps this time, we saw a "show" instead

The "show"

At first I thought it was a show for kids, as there were several school groups there. As you can see by the picture, it was mostly middle-aged women in the audience. The kids didn't seem very interested, and that's because it was these guys pretending to be some character from history, but far more kakkoii (cool) and doing this choreographed fight/dance thing in between lots of talking about nothing much. Basically, it was their job to strut around looking cute to entertain the middle-aged ladies. It worked, apparently. Even Sumi thought they were cute. Not that I would ever call her middle-aged. Moving on...

The bus ride reminded me that the only thing to ever be afraid of on roads in Japan are buses. On our very first cycling trip in Hokkaido, there was a stretch in Biei with a bunch of tour buses, and that was the most unpleasant riding we had up there. Being in this bus, I could only imagine people and pets scampering out of the way as it careened through the countryside. I was certain we would arrive to find some poor cow hanging on to the front of the bus for dear life. I very determinedly did NOT look out the window when we were moving. Japanese highways often do not have guard rails around sharp turns in mountains. We were driving through the mountains.

We somehow managed to arrive in Amakusa in one piece, without additional livestock, and gratefully got off the bus at the terminal. We chose a hotel very close to the terminal, so a short walk later we arrived at one of the more interesting hotels we've been to.

I...wait....what?

I don't even know where to start. I'm glad they have comfortable sheep and that the beds are cleaned by dolphins (how that is a selling point, I'm not sure), and honestly, the thought of being a Toothbrush Geek is somewhat appealing. But I saw no sign of an Entropy Shower, and I totally looked for one. The soap did, indeed, look a bit tired.

After non-entropy showers and a hearty meal at Joy-Full, a local chain restaurant, we grabbed our luggage from the room, keeping an eye out for Breakfast Owls, and assembled out bikes in the back alley of the hotel. For once, there were no issues. No flat tires, no pedal falling off. The bikes seemed to be in good shape and after a bit of brake adjustment, were ready to go. As my day had started a 9pm the previous night, we collapsed pretty early, ready to hit the road tomorrow.