Long climb into Aso

The forecast of possible thunderstorms in the late morning were completely wrong. It was sunny and bright the entire day, and we spent much of the morning in the rolling foothills of Aso, a complex of five mountain peaks all formed by the same volcanic activity, and still an active volcano today.

After a quick stop at Family Mart for juice and yogurt, we began our climb into Aso. I say climb because there is a 970m mountain between us and the city. Most of the day will be spent uphill, with just enough downhill to make us wish it weren't there, because every time we go down, we just have to go back up again until we get close to the city.

The roads were not very busy on a Sunday morning, so the riding was easy, except fo the whole uphill thing. There were a number of small towns along the way. One of them, Kashima, I think it was called, had some large paper-mache figures outside of their elementary school that were instantly recognizable.

As we got higher up into the mountains, we started seeing mountain shrines along the way. Or at least entrances to shrines

There's a sign saying up another 2km...

And a bike trip in the mountains would not be complete without a tunnel, our first one of the trip.

Tunnels always mean we avoided going up even higher

When we finally crested the mountain, we had a long, three mile descent into the valley where Aso City resides. It was absolutely beautiful, with long clear vistas of the peaks as we glided down the mountain. The road was narrow, and there were very few places to pull over, so not many pictures, but it was a great way to end a tough day of biking.

Because of the light traffic, we ended up arriving about three hours early for check-in. We wasted about an hour in the Family Mart cafe eating a light lunch and trying to find coin laundry and edible food. We are staying on the outskirts of town, so nothing is very close, and many places were closed Sundays. This is partially because we are out of season, and partially because the area is still recovering from the earthquake and later rains that did so much damage to Kumamoto. Aso, as we discovered because we apparently could not properly read a map before, is about 26 miles from Kumamoto. The train line from Aso to Kumamoto is still shut down, three years later, and is not set to open until next spring.

What this meant was, our options were slim. We found a coin laundry a few miles away, and figured we could get something done while waiting. The roads were very much major arteries and not designed for bikes, so it wasn't going to be a fun ride. But the god of lazy cyclists must have had some free time, because as we began our trek to the laundromat, we had gotten about 500 meters before this appeared on our right

It was run down. There were only two light bulbs in the six fixtures and they didn't work. Half the dryers were out of order, as was the change machine. But it was two miles closer to our hotel. And it had two benches to sleep on. It wasn't on any of our maps, very likely because the owner didn't even have enough money to fix the broken units, let alone advertise. Needless to say, laundry and a nap were both taken care of, and we could finally check in to our hotel, which turned out to be a nice onsen ryoukan, Minshuku Asogen.

Nice, traditional tatami room with futons

We were also reunited with our suitcases and other luggage that we had sent ahead. This is our final cycling stop, so we'll be packing the bikes up tomorrow and sending them to the airport while we frolic* in Tokyo for a few days. A nice trip to the ofuro and we were ready to tackle the last challenge: eating. It wasn't us being picky. There just wasn't much open around us. We settled on the local greasy spoon diner (well, the Japanese equivalent) a few blocks away. It served Ramen, Chanpon(a mix of whatever they felt like throwing in, usually some meat, seafood and vegetables), and Itame. I ordered the Vegetable Itame and Sumi ordered ramen. We both ordered some gyoza, which turned out to be a good thing.

When you advertise something as "Vegetable <something>", that would imply that it has, well, vegetables in it, right? And if you were to put in, say, pork AND squid AND octopus AND fish, you would want to advertise it as something other than VEGETABLE something, right? How is that vegetable anything? So, I very carefully ate the vegetables (which were very good) and some stuff that looked and tasted like pork, and left the whole baby squid, strips of octopus and god knows what else on the plate. Sumi had some very greasy ramen with fatty pork slices, which, after all the amazing ramen we've had this trip, was quite a letdown. We left not completely full and wholly unsatisfied. This was really the first food fail of the trip, so we can't complain too much.

Back to Family Mart (they are going to know our names by the time we leave) for some supplemental food and juice, then to our room. Tomorrow we'll head up to the volcano and take a look.

*take trains everywhere, eat way too much, sleep way too much