From a Campground to a Luxury Resort

 Waking up this morning reminded us of exactly where practically every muscle in our legs, backs, and butts are located. This is what we get for not being in shape for our trip. In any case, getting up and seeing this out the back window kinda makes it worth it.

It was still very cloudy and chilly, but no rain in the forecast as we began our 40 mile trip to Ashinomaki, an Onsen resort area in the middle of...well...nowhere. We had a vague route planned that Sumi had done some work on to make sure we stayed on backroads as much as possible. This meant a few more miles and a lot more hills, but the biking was much more relaxed and the scenery was awesome.

Throughout the ride today, we saw all sorts of shinto shrines, more than we usually do. We also saw a lot of mascot signs.

We saw probably 50 different shrines today

Just a panda saying hello. No context, no other signage.

Tochimarukin, the mascot of Tochigi Prefecture. In a strawberry.

There was nothing open where we were last night, and the nearest convenience store was 10 miles away (practically unheard of in Japan), so we didn't have breakfast. We did happen upon a roadside marketplace though, that had a lot of fresh and dried foods, so "breakfast" was served!

Apples, dried fruit, and yuzu chestnut jellies

The yuzu chestnut treats were like mochi but not quite as sweet. They were absolutely delicious! Now that we weren't starving we hit the road again, on our way to the Okuaizu Museum, a small museum with lots of artifacts from prehistoric Japan (20,000 BC) as well as a preserved thatched-roof community, similar to that of the Ainu in Hokkaido. This particular people, the Aizu, were skilled in wood carving and indigo dyeing. Several of their buildings were on display for us to walk inside and look around. It was pretty cool and well worth the ¥300 entrance fee.

The rest of the ride was great. Aside from a few miles that we had to be on the main road, we were on some of our favorite kinds of roads in Japan. Between many of the rice paddies are public access roads that are flat, straight, and almost always empty and surrounded by the paddies and usually forest and mountains. 

Typical Japanese PSA. Note the pouting dog carrying his own poop and scooper.

When we left the cities, we ended up on twisting mountain roads. Most of the spectacular views were on bridges where we couldn't stop and take pictures. But we followed the Aga river for most of the day, crossing it numerous times.

Solar farm outside of Shimogo

There were also numerous small (and I mean SMALL) tunnels, often one lane, that we encountered. 

Being so far from any towns and very much off-season for many of the tourist areas we were passing through, our lunch again consisted of the finest cuisine that 7-11 had to offer

The Sesame Chicken Wrap was quite good. So was the Meiji Black!

We arrived in Ashinomaki at about 4 and pulled into the hotel parking lot. We knew instantly that we were going to stand out from their typical clientele.

We had a pretty young woman in full kimono gear greet us at the front door. We were sweaty and covered in grime from the road in our biking shorts and jackets. In typical Japanese fashion, they completely ignored our substandard couture and checked us in. The room was....OK....

Yeah, this'll do

For those that have not read our earlier blogs, during the off-season in Japan, most small resorts just shut down and only open during high season (late summer), while many of the larger resort hotels stay open, but offer spectacular deals. We have stayed at so many 4 and 5 star resorts for under $100 by coming to Japan in late spring. The down side is nothing else, and I mean NOTHING else is open. You either have to spent $120 on a (seafood) meal at the hotel restaurant or bring your own food. As we walked yet again to the local 7-11, we passed no fewer than six ramen shops, all closed. We also realized that our resort has its own shrine

Literally "Onsen Shrine"

Kagayaki Park. The pool on the left is fed by the hot ground water, rather sulfer-y as well.

This is why people pay $300 a night around here

Our "gochisou"

Tomorrow we're passing through a full-sized town (Aizu-Wakamatsu), so we may have to stop and eat some real food before heading back into the wilderness.

And we're off!

 Woke up this morning ready to get out and bike in the mountains for the first time in five years! And then...

• The showers weren't open until 6
• It was raining
• Sumi's bike does what Sumi's bike does at the start of every trip

How does she get a flat without actually biking?

The good news is, it's happened so often it only takes a few minutes to change the tube out, a little longer in the rain and with a tiny hand pump. We were on our way by 8, about 2.5 hours later than usual. But we only had 30 miles today. We tried to make it easy on ourselves getting back in the saddle. As it turned out, the day was even easier than we expected. The first 15 miles were all downhill, so in about 90 minutes, including a lot of staring at the map, we were halfway there.

The rain precluded a lot of picture taking, but the scenery out here is absolutely gorgeous. We are in the middle of the Nikko National Park which is hundreds of kilometers of mountains, rivers, and trees. We stopped briefly at the Koana dam, one of the many hydroelectric dams in the region

And by about 11, the rain had mostly dissipated, allowing us to finally take a few pictures of the scenery.

Following the river valley turned out to be a good choice, as the climbs were not steep and the roads were not that busy. This area during tourist season is a zoo. We passed a whole series of huge hotels and onsen resorts that were all ghost towns now, but could house literally thousands of people each.

About two miles from our first stop, Nakamiyori, we pulled over in the parking lot of a closed shop to drink some water and juice. Sumi chose the lot because there was a ice cream flag out front. As luck would have it, the proprietor was just getting to work (the shop was a soba/udon restaurant). He saw us looking rather like drowned rats and told us if we wanted he could get us some ice cream (but nothing else, as he had just gotten there). We eagerly agreed and he invited us into the shop, which had a nice dining room with a large window overlooking the river.

Pure bliss

They usually mix in some wasabi concoction into the ice cream (their specialty), but Sumi asked for plain soft cream, which his what we got. He also brought some iced coffee out, which was all very generous as he was trying to get the shop prepped for lunch. The ice cream was a very good plain cream flavor (not vanilla) and it was a great treat for the end of the ride. 

The name, "Baa-chan no mise" translates to "Granny's Shop"

We rolled into Nakamiyori at about 1:30, a little too early for check in. We had reserved what we thought was a little cabin in a campground bordering some onsens. Turns out it was a little more than a cabin

The "main hall" for the campground

Our "little" cabin, Kaede

Our cabin, named Kaede, is an amazing 2-story building that can house 4 comfortably.

There is a full kitchen around the corner!

The upstairs is a big loft bedroom

With futons

The area is a big onsen resort area, meaning most people come here to soak in hot springs, so the cabins do not have showers or baths. Well, everything is closed right now, since we're in the offseason. We asked the guy at the desk if there was a sentou or something around so we could wash all the road dirt away. There wasn't anything. close by, but they did offer to let us use their showers. Just like the guy that served us ice cream, this was really going out of their way to help, as they needed to turn on their (industrial sized) hot water heater just for us. 

One last thing that happened that I thought was pretty cool, but happened way too fast to get a picture, was when we were leaving for the shower there was a large, white, monkey wandering near the campgrounds. It turned and ran when it saw us, but it is the very first time I've ever seen a Macaque in the wild. They are bigger than one would expect, about the size of a medium-sized dog, and are found all over this area of the country. 

Not my picture, but this is a Japanese Macaque

We're both a little sore and a lot tired after today. We'll see how well everything dries out overnight and hopefully get an earlier start to tomorrow's trip up the river.

Up to Nikko to Get the Trip Started

After crashing really hard last night, we were both up and ready to get moving...rather late, around 9. We stayed at a small hotel right next to Ueno Park, which was clearly made for people smaller than I. My shoulders brushed the walls of some of the hallway if I walked straight down and the doors....

Remember, I'm only 6 feet tall.

As per our tradition when we're in Ueno, we walked up to the station and had a nice breakfast at Andersen Bakery.

Ueno Cheese Balls, Panda Cream, and Anpan

After a nice, leisurely breakfast, we hopped on the Ginza line to get to Asakusa-eki 

The SkyTree and the Golden Poo: Two iconic Asakusa landmarks.

where we took the Tobu limited express service up to Nikko. Two hours later, we were in the small mountain town of Nikko, which houses a World Heritage site, the Toshogu Shrine, a mausoleum for the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu. We visited the shrine complex in 2018 when we cycled from Tokyo to Nagano, and it was so crowded with tourists that we didn't stick around to see everything. Our goal was to get our bikes put together, ship our cases on ahead to Fukushima, and maybe do a little sightseeing and we chose Nikko because it connected with the route we planned on taking and it was far enough north to be away from the Tokyo traffic.

Nikko is 100% a tourist town, and has a number of things to see and do outside of the shrine. The area is popular for skiing, hiking, and other outdoor activities and has numerous lakes, waterfalls, and yes, mountains. They have an old restored steam train (trains are a big part of Japanese culture) that visitors can ride up to the Kinugawa Onsen resort.

The SL Taiju

Walking to our hotel, we spied the telltale sign that we were in a tourist trap.

Note the golden Lucky Hello Kitty out front.

Fortunately it's the beginning of the trip and "we" can't buy anything that we're not going to be carrying on our backs for the next few weeks, so we escaped without adding to the collection. Our hotel was not even open yet, but they had coin lockers out front, so we dropped all our gear and took a bus up to the shrine to walk around for a bit before we could check in. This is normal in Japan, by the way. Hotels usually do not allow check in until 3-4PM, and if the last guest checked out in the morning, smaller places will just shut down until check in that evening.

The shrine was, not surprisingly, overrun with tourists and school field trips, but not as bad as when we were last here. We did make it all the way up to the mausoleum this time. The shrine is an explosion of color and art, which is very unlike most shrines in Japan and resembles Chinese Buddhist temples with their extravagant carvings and coloring. Every building has multiple animals and scenes carved into it, including the famous Sanzaru, the three monkeys ("See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil"),

a carving of a sleeping cat above the entranceway leading to the mausoleum

Nemurineko

and one of my favorites, the "Imaginary Elephants"

The story behind these elephants is perfect in highlighting the absurdities of Japanese culture of the time. An artist was tasked by the shogun with carving rare elephants. The artist had never seen an elephant in his life. At that point in history only three elephants had ever been brought to Japan, and only high ranking nobles were ever allowed to see them. The artist read about what they were supposed to look like and "imagined" what they would do. The result is what you get when you cross a traditional depiction of Chinese tigers with ostensibly elephants. The best part is no one else involved knew what an elephant was supposed to look like either, and so it ended up as the main artwork over the entrance to the Kamijinko, one of the sacred storehouses. Of particular note for me are the claws, the half-moon eyes, and the pose of the left "elephant". 

Below are a few more pictures of the shrine area. They don't really do the place justice, but give a sense of what every building in the complex looks like.

As we were leaving, we spotted the post office that was located on the shrine grounds. 

We made our way back to the hotel and got checked in. Our bikes arrived shortly after and we spent the next several hours getting everything put together and organized. It was about 6PM and we hadn't eaten lunch, so we were tired and hungry. It turns out Nikko the town shuts down about 5. All of the restaurants in the area were already closed except for bars and one Yuba restaurant. Yuba, as we found out, is tofu skin. After you slaughter the tofu, you skin it, and this is the result. 

Is what went through my mind, but the reality isn't nearly as awesome. You boil soy milk and the stuff that hardens on the surface of the milk, that's yuba. In any case, it was our only choice and we were up for something new. Until we looked at the menu and saw that it was mostly soup with floating yuba and sashimi. The Yuba Curry did not look appetizing either. The place was small and they had a sign informing impatient tourists that the meals take up to 30 minutes to prepare. Being the only game in town at this point, the place was full and we had to wait about 15 minutes to get seated. They did have what they called "burgers", which were actually sandwiches with either fried chicken or roast beef, which was better than a burger, in my opinion.

The fries were fresh potato wedges seasoned with a hint of cinnamon, which was really quite good. The "burgers" were decent and smelled a lot better than the "Yuba Ramen Chef Recommended Special" that the women next to me ordered.

After a quick stop at FamilyMart to buy breakfast for tomorrow, we collapsed in our room. Tomorrow's forecast is scattered showers, a perfect way to start our cycling trip...

We made it!

 In years past we drove to Chicago and parked at a hotel, then took a shuttle to the airport. There were two problems with that

1. Getting a shuttle BACK to the hotel after the trip was almost always a royal pain and took the better part of an hour.
2. One of us would then have to drive home 2 hours while severely jet-lagged

So on our last trip to the Maldives we decided to try taking a bus to the airport, instead. Other than the ice storm/blizzard/sub-zero temps, it worked rather well so we booked with CoachUSA and left the park and ride at 6:00 this morning. The seats on the bus...let's just say I am now prepared for Japan after that ride. My knees almost fit. That said, the bus was not full at all so we were able to spread out to mitigate my lack of dwarfism. The ride itself was nice and quiet and we arrived early enough to...have to wait for the ANA ticket counter to open.

The ANA employees do this thing when they start work that is just so Japanese (even though most of them are not, at least in O'Hare). At exactly 8:45, the door opens and they march, single file, to their workstations. They come out in the correct order, so no one is breaking the line, then they pull out these spray bottles and begin disinfecting their workstations. They do this and other cleaning (of just their spots) for about 5 minutes. Then there's some kind of signal and they all start working.

The flight itself, other than being long (13 hours), was mostly quiet. Early on there were some very chatty teenagers so I decided to listen to a little bit on music to drown them out and maybe take a nap. ANA has some interesting musical selections

Spoiler: There was no yelling

It was mostly pretty bland new-age guitar and piano with some bird sounds added. I was rather disappointed at the lack of yelling in Best Yell Songs, too.

ANA has one of those interactive map apps that shows you the airplane from different angles with information about the speed, ETA, etc. It also had a rather odd idea of how shadows work. 

The imaginary route line has it's own shadow. Or chemtrails.

Hey, I wonder what Sumi is watch...oh...

We were greeted by a number of celebrities as we got off the plane and made our way to immigration

We rolled into our hotel at about 6. It's located in the heart of Ueno which has as its mascot a panda. everything in the entire neighborhood is panda themed.

We were tired but pretty hungry. The flight had food and we ate it, but it wasn't really enough for 20 hours worth of travel. We started by heading up to Ueno Station to get some ramen, but the line was very long. This is normal in Japan but we were too tired to stand in line for 30+ minutes to eat. So we took a walk doen AmeyaYokocho (America Alley) which is several alleys actually full of shops and open air bars. It was loud and all the food looked either wet, fishy, or both. 

I mean, at least TRY to make it look like a pizza from Chicago...

Not once, not twice, but THREE times...

So tired and desperate, we trudged down the street....

NO JUDGING!!!!

I will note this meal does not count towards the actual CoCo Curry totals as we have not started our trip yet. 

So, finally full and now practically falling asleep while walking we walked back to the hotel and collapsed. Tomorrow is going to be a relaxing day of traveling to Nikko, where we'll start our biking on Wednesday.

おやすみなさい

Cycling again!

It's been 5 years since we last brought our bikes to Japan to do some cycling and we are finally doing it again! Our plan is to start north of Tokyo in Nikko and work our way north and east towards Sendai. This area between Nikko and Morioka is the only portion of mainland Japan we have not yet cycled through. That and Okinawa are all that remain on our multi-year Length of Japan travels, so we'll see how much of a dent we can put in it this time around!

Our Rough Plan

The last few months leading up to the trip have been very busy and a bit stressful for both of us, so we are NOT in biking shape right now, so there's going to be a very....relaxed pace to start the trip. That said, there's a lot of nothing through some of these areas, so we will still have to make it to a few towns on a schedule. We don't have any set route other than the first few days, so we'll see hows things shake out.

またサイクリングできるのがとてもワクワクしています!