Bicycle touring in Thailand 2018 day 1 (11/05)

Now under writing. Plaese wait.

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Bicycle touring in Northeast Japan 2018 day 1 (07/25)

Now under writing. please wait.

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Okinawa Touring Day 4: Start Touring !

English | 日本語

This is my first visit in Naha, so I did some local sightseeing on foot in the last two days. It was a lot of fun, but I didn't ride my bike and I won't introduce it for the enjoyment of those who will come here to visit.

In the morning, I get up at 8:00 a.m. and pack the leftover vegetables from the fridge into a tupperware, soak the brown rice and soybeans in water and put this in another tupperware too. I cook the rice at dinner time, but I usually soak it in water before I leave.
I left at 9:30 a.m. after chatting for a while with an uncle I met at the inn while drinking coffee. Since the rice cake I had eaten yesterday was very tasty, I bought some purple sweet potatoes, brown sugar and yomogi rice cakes for a snack in the shopping street near the guesthouse.

It's lightly cloudy, but muggy and hot in the sun. The headwind was quite strong and there were frequent minor ups and downs, so the riding pace was slow. I arrived at the Himeyuri Tower around 11 o'clock. Since they were selling flowers at the entrance, I offered them for 200 jpy. I decided to go ahead because it costs money to go to the museum.

Next stop is the Peace Memorial Park. It's only about 3km from the Himeyuri Tower, so I arrived in no time. The park is large and well maintained. It costs money just to climb the Peace Memorial Tower, but it's no problem to take pictures from outside. The museum looked interesting, so I paid the entrance fee and went inside. There was similar to the one in Naha and explaining from the Japanese confiscation of the island to the fighting in the Second World War, and the story of the island after it was returned to the Japanese after the war. However, this museum has more materials and explanations about the battle. After that, I visited the joint graves of the war dead. There are inscriptions of 240,000 people, both inside and outside the city.

After that, I rode about 7 km to Gyokusen-dong. I thought the cave was a stand-alone one, but it is attached to a theme park with a lot of souvenirs, and people have to pay 1250 yen to get in. I hadn't researched it beforehand, but since it is the second largest cave in Japan, I decided to go in, even though I usually avoid paying to enter the site seeing spots. Indeed, the inside is large, there were very many stalactites. It was good that the passage is well maintained and good things. But unlike the mainland's cave, the interior is very warm and always seems to be around 20 degrees Celsius.

Well, today's sightseeing is almost finished, and then I'm going to eat and sleep, but I don't have any plans yet. First of all, I searched for supermarkets, and found several of them in a cluster about 3 km away, so I went to Dongfudaira JA Coop for now. The vegetables here were cheap. Two pieces of bitter gourd were 220 jpy, but now I have some on hand, so I'd like to buy some and make bitter gourd stir-fry when there are fewer ingredients on hand. Five green peppers, bean sprouts, four packages of natto (fermented soybeans), and 400 grams of Okinawan tofu were 370 jpy, which was very cheap.

Now that the food is in hand, the next step is to find a place to sleep. I looked around for a park, but there was no good place to sleep outdoors. I went to Motobu Park, but the children playing there asked me a lot of questions as usual. Afterwards, I finally came to a place called Osato-Uchihara Park. There is a baseball field and tennis courts, but it doesn't look like it's very well maintained. There are covered benches and water toilets, so it looks like a good place to stay. Although it is past 18 o'clock, the children are still playing, so I just have a snack and see how it goes. I decided to cook rice and set up the tent when nobody was there. It would be a bit of a problem if I would be told not to go in at night, but I'd like to set up the tent here (where it's roofed) because it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

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Southern Okinawa Main Island Tour 33km

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Okinawa Touring Day 1: To Okinawa

English | 日本語

It's still dark and windy outside.
Today is the first day of cycling in Okinawa, and I'm going to ride my own bike from my home in Machida to Narita airport to catch a plane as same as Hokkaido touring in the last year. There are some reasons to do that, the one is the cost saving of transportation (about 3,000 yen by train or 6,000 yen by bus!), the other is in order to check the condition of my bike and myself by riding about 110 km. In fact, I was going to do that on the trip to Vietnam before, but it was raining at that time. It would be ok to ride in the rain, but I was hassle too much after arriving at the airport, so I decided to go by train. I'd like to continue this style of starting the touring in the future.

By the way, the route to Narita, I mostly took a walking route on google map (not available for cycling route in Japan). Sometimes I'm made to take a strange route, but it's a bit charm. I thought the route suggesting by google map was the same route as last year, but it seemed to run from Shinjuku to Asakusa to Funabashi to Narita in this time. My flight will departure at 2 PM, so I'd like to arrive at the airport before 12 PM, which means I'll leave 7 hours before, at 5 AM. The bike with luggage is very heavy and tiring to ride at high speed, so I estimated the time at an average speed of 15 km/h, including rest periods.

My touring style is to ride a bicycle and stay at a random place, occasionally staying at an inn, and if I'm in Japan, I also use internet cafes and super public baths. I cook my own meals using local ingredients, sometimes at a restaurant. This way, I can get to know the area well without spending a lot of money. I don't often go to the tourist-filled, decorated places, because I travel because I enjoy the route, not because I'm looking forward to getting to site seeing in my destination.

I can hardly feel a headwind when I was cycling today. That means it's a pretty strong tailwind. I'm so glad it wasn't a headwind. But that's why I get blown around so much in a crosswind. I didn't use the pannier bags that are often used on bike trips, and instead I usually carry my luggage on the front and rear carriers or towed a trailer, so I was extremely vulnerable to crosswinds.

The route was smooth, and I didn't get lost until around halfway to Asakusa, which took about three hours. I thought we'd be able to arrive in the morning with this, but I got fooled by the navigation system on google map and ended up getting lost quite a bit further down the road. Come to think of it, I remembered the same thing last year when going to Hokkaido.

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In the end, I arrived at Narita Airport Terminal 3 at 12 PM on schedule. I unloaded my luggage and started folding my bike, but it was more difficult than I expected. So I'm going to make a note of some improvements for the next time.

• Remove the handlebar.
  (I was going to leave it loose and bent, but the width doesn't fit)
• Remove the front carrier with the screws at the brake and at the top of the carrier.
  (I removed it from the base, so it took a while)
• Remove the rear derailleur, leaving the hangers in place.
  (Removing the entire hanger because I'll be viewing it with the carrier and quick, it will take longer to both attach and remove it).

When I weighed my luggage at the airport counter at check-in, my checked-in bicycle and camping gear weighed 21.6 kg and my carry-on luggage weighed 7.6 kg, so I couldn't reach my target weight of 20 kg/7 kg. If I could reach this weight, I could fly fairly cheaply, but what should I do? I can reduce my luggage based on local procurement, but I'll need to compare that time and cost with the round-trip luggage price at 5 kg more. Considering that I'll be carrying a few souvenirs on the way home, I guess 25 kg/7 kg is still a reasonable amount of checked baggage for the plane.

As I sensed on the route to Narita, there was a strong wind today. I got on the plane and headed for the runway, but it was a long time from there. A number of planes couldn't take off and land due to the strong wind, and I ended up having to wait for nearly two hours for the plane to take off.

I arrived at Naha around 6:30 PM, and I received my luggage by hand from the staff. This is a common sight on Japanese carrier airlines, but it was the first time for me to experience this on an LCC. Oh well, not bad. It was a bit of a bummer to get from the LCC terminal to the main terminal in Naha airport. I couldn't get there on foot, so I had to take a shuttle bus. It took me 30 minutes to get on the shuttle bus because of a lot of passengers. When I was planning to travel easily with only carry-on luggage, I thought this was ruined.

Finally, I could go out of the airport and started to assemble the bike. It took longer than I expected because of the trouble I had to go through when I was folding the bike in Narita. I loaded my luggage and set the inn on the navigation system, and started to ride, but it was completely dark outside. By the way, I use the voice navigation system. I can't see well with my phone screen on the handlebar because I'm an old man, and I'm wearing waterproof bluetooth speaker, so it's just fine.

I arrived at the inn at 8:30 PM. Here is a cheap dormitory, so I received a lecture on how to use the inn, and took a shower. It's called "Little Asia" near the International Street, and it's about 1000 yen per night on Expedia. Because of the high cost of living in Japan, it is not the same as in Southeast Asia, but it was not bad.

I walked out to the International Street and while I was looking at the menu in front of the Okinawan restaurant, the lady at the restaurant explained things to me. I told her I'm vegan and can't eat meat, fish, eggs and milk, and she said there were some dishes that could be prepared without them, so I decided to go in. This is my first time in Okinawa, so naturally it was my first time to try the local Okinawan food. There were a lot of vegetable and seaweed dishes on the menu able to eat for vegans.

When I was having a meal, a foreigner came to the table next to me by himself. His greeting Japanese was quite good, I thought he might be a person from the US military stationed in Okinawa, but I thought he was a tourist because locals would not come to the tourists area. He asked for shabu-shabu, but he didn't seem to know how to eat it, so I helped him a little. It had been a long time since I spoke English, but it seemed to be able to handle it. He came to Japan last week from Argentina, and went from Tokyo to Okinawa to Nara. He likes anime and martial arts (Karate, Ninjutsu) and is a big fan of Naruto. It's really strange feeling to hear a foreigner talk about how great Japanese culture is.

Then it was almost 10 PM, but I strolled around the street a bit and bought a pair of sandals that I was going to buy locally. The surface of the sandals was straw and quite light and good. I returned to the inn at 11 PM and went to bed soon.

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From home to Narita airport 105 km

From Naha airport to Naha city 5 km

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I became a vegan

English | 日本語

I'm allergic.

I don't know if it's congenital or acquired.

Asthma, hay fever, UV rays, etc.

It was before I was 40 years old that I wanted to improve my allergies.

Naturally, I researched a lot of things to improve my constitution.

At that time, mad cow disease and other diseases were all over the world. Therefore, I also researched the situation of food production.

I came to the conclusion that I should not eat protein from mammals that were close to humans.

At that time, I still had a lot of doubts about food, such as, "It's OK if I couldn't eat steak and pork cutlet," "The Japanese can't do without sushi," and "I can't miss Yakitori". I was also attracted to the macrobiotic diet of brown rice and cereals, so I changed my diet.

This is how I became a "semi-vegetarian".

What I found out here is that in Japan, just saying "no mammals" severely restricts my diet. Food bought at supermarkets and convenience stores, eating out. If I'm not careful, there's usually something in it. Of course, when I talk to people, they are surprised and ask me why I eat the way I do. It made me realize that this is a country with a remarkable lack of diversity.

How has been my health?

Neither hay fever nor sun allergies have been cured, but the symptoms have lessened.

Most noticeable is "bowel movements". My bowel movements are fluffier and the amount of bowel movements has increased. I don't have hemorrhoids anymore, which I used to worry about many times a year because of my sedentary job for a long time. I don't have any abnormal results in my health checkup. Isn't that wonderful?

And now I'm in my mid-50s. My wife suffers from high blood pressure. So I decided to change my and her diet again to improve our constitution. But this time, mainly it's not about me.

As I did some research, I found that the information on vegetarianism has certainly been updated from more than a decade ago. Population growth, food problems, and environmental problems on the planet are serious. This is a problem for my children and grandchildren and beyond. I knew about "veganism" but that's when I did my research. Finally, I decided to change my life again.

I became a vegan.

This is a big deal in Japan. It means I have to reject most modern Japanese food. But as long as I choose the ingredients and cook them myself, it's not a problem. Fortunately, it's easy to get my own food. However, while eating out became almost impossible, I also learned that if I stopped eating out, I wouldn't have to.

I also experienced what the differences in eating habits would be like if I went out of the country. It varies from country to country, but the fact that Japan has such a low diversity of values became even more apparent to me.

How has my health improved? I am approaching 60 years old and am in excellent health. The checkups don't find any vital problems. My allergies may not go away, but they don't get any worse. My wife's high blood pressure has not worsened, but has improved slightly due to my eating habits. Vegan life as a personal health is not bad.

A change in food changes my outlook on life.

However, it would take a very long time to talk about it, so I'll just tell you how I became a Vegan today.

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Hokkaido Touring Day 28: Suddenly it's over.

English | 日本語

I went to bed last night just after midnight, but woke up at 5:30 as usual. It wasn't that comfortable, but I did get some sleep. Today I tried the free morning set from the Kaikatsu Club. The Free version is a bit small in quantity, so I added 100 jpy to get a double size. After the meal, clean up and replenish the drinks and pack. Since it was raining, I put on rain gear and left.

I met a high school student rinding a city bike in the rain. He was riding around from Ibaraki to Hokkaido with a backpack on back and strapped to a 3-speed city bike tied his luggage. He said now he was on their way back. He doesn't have a tent, just a sleeping bag, and he is traveling in the field. He said he's going to ride today without sleeping, and he's going home by tomorrow. He was young and full of energy. I wouldn't be able to keep going if I were to do that.

The peaches sold at the roadside station on the way were super tasty. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know Fukushima Prefecture was a peach-producing region. It's called "Kenjyou peaches". I was faster than the high-school boy from earlier, but since I was taking a break here, I met him again. I gave him the rest of the peaches and cheered him on.

A little past noon, after 100km, I think about today's destination and decided to stay in a health resort for the first time.

I guess I have about 30km to go. Suddenly the pedals locked up and I couldn't turn them. I can't turn it forward or backward. Did something bite the wheel? I stopped the bike and examined the rear wheel in a hurry. Then I found that the chain was biting into the rear pulley. When I looked closer, I saw that the pulley teeth were missing! In an instant, I knew why.

When I flew the bike to Hokkaido, I bent the rear derailleur hanger when I arrived at the Chitose airport, but I had to use force to fix it. But in reality, the hanger was still a bit bent slightly. I managed to cheat my way to this point, but the bent hanger seemed to keep putting a load on the rear pulley and chain at an angle. As a result, the rain kept scraping the aluminum pulley to the stainless steel chain until there was no longer any place for it to catch... The chain has been reconnected several times, but it still falls between the pulley and the cage, so it seems to be impossible to make it ride, although it can be pushed if the pulley is not replaced.

Using Google Maps to find a nearby bike shop and station. The station is about 1km away, so I can push my bike to get there. Unfortunately, there is no bike shop, and if I go to Koriyama station from here, I may find a bike shop. I also checked the time and cost of taking a conventional train from here to home, and it took about 6 hours! It was going to cost about 3,500 jpy to get home. Now what to do....

It's still going to rain for a while and I don't know if I'll be able to get parts for it. If I can't fix it, it will probably cost me a lot of money to stay. My family in Tokyo will be home tomorrow, and I have some other things I want to fix the bike.
I decided to end this trip here.
Then I pushed my bike to the station, packed and got on the train.

It took me about six hours to get to Machida station from Koriyama to Machida on the conventional line, but most of the time I was able to sit down, so I didn't get so tired. But it was strange feeling to say that I was in Sendai this morning, but I was already home at night. I was so tired, so I took a bath at home for the first time in a long time and slept soundly. I'm a little disappointed, but there's always another chance. I'm more interested in fixing the things I found out on this trip, and I can't wait honestly to go back for the next trip.

(Fin)

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仙台から二本松 100km

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Hokkaido Touring Day 27: To Sendai City

English | 日本語

It rained quite a bit in the middle of the night. In the morning, it seemed to have stopped raining, so I decided to clean up the tent and hang it out to dry first. Then I ate breakfast with bread and coffee. As the sun was starting to shine, I dried off just in time to leave at 7:30 AM. It seems unlikely that the running dry machine (=my bike) will work well in this weather.

I tried to take a video with my Chinese action camera, SJCAM, but it was cloudy. It seems that yesterday's rain got into the camera and condensation got inside. It's not a bad action camera, but I want to get something with a longer battery life and without a waterproof housing. In the meantime, no video recording until the condensation clears up. The rain have destroyed a lot of things on this touring trip.
This area has a brown monotone sign for the shop as the picture. Why is that?

I take a lunch break around 12:00 and eat a rice ball and a banana. I checked the battery life of my new phone while eating lunch. I've used only 15% of it in about 5 hours so far. If I had charged it during the break, it would have increased to 93%. I'll use the navigation system after this to check my consumption, but it's a great power saving phone, great. Longer use and shorter charging time. After all, it's hard to get a true picture of usability from a simple catalog spec.

A little past three o'clock, I arrived at the roadside station, Sambongi. There were many dumplings and rice cakes for sale, and I'm a sucker for sweet things, so I couldn't help but be tempted to buy them all. Zunda dumplings are delicious!
Google Maps showed a shortcut route to Route 4 in the direction of Sendai, so I went there. I knew Google Maps always give me a lot of challenge. There is a mountain route. Route 4 must have taken a detour through the mountains. The distance was short, but the fatigue and time must have been greater here.

After a break, I found about ten adults and children gathered by the side of a nearby rice field, waving to each other. As I approached, they seemed to be cheering me on, saying, "Hang in there!" I smiled and said, "Thank you!" And as I got more closer, the kids responded as usual, saying things like "awesome" and "cool". It's quite fun.

I managed to get to Sendai Station at 5 PM and pushed my bicycles through the arcade to look at the shops and restaurants. I soon found a beef tongue shop that also delivers beef, so I sent some meat, hamburgers and sausages as bring home for my family in Tokyo. After my little mission, I'm going to take my time to find a bath, food and a place to sleep.

I went to a public bath in the neighborhood. Here is a town where the entertainment district called Sendai Kokubuncho is located. Most of the customers in the bath have tattoos. Well, I'm an old man now, so I took a bath with a nonchalant look on my face. I hadn't taken a bath in three days, so it was very comfortable. Then I went to the coin laundry in the same building and washed yesterday and today's clothes. Here in Sendai, The washing fee is only 400 jpy. I think I would have been happy to use a laundromat for such a price.
While I was washing clothes, I looked for a restaurant for dinner. The nearby beef tongue restaurant "Tsukasa" seemed to have a good reputation, so I will go there. I think for the lodging is an internet cafe, but I don't feel comfortable leaving my bicycle in the Sendai station area, so I decided to stay internet cafe located in a suburban.

After completing my laundry, it was starting to rain, so I put on my rain gear and headed to "Tsukasa". Maybe it was a popular restaurant, but there was a line... I had to wait 30 minutes and got the 1.5-person beef tongue set meal. The meat, soup and rice were all delicious. Remembering back on it carefully, I realized that the restaurant I came to last year with my wife was also a branch of this restaurant. It was a strange coincidence.

After dinner, I'm pushing my bike and looking out at the city at night, and just like in the daytime, I hear people saying "awesome" and "cool". At night, however, it's the adults, not the kids, who are saying that...

A little after nine o'clock, I could arrive at an internet cafe in the suburbs. And I charge all my devices, write in my diary, and considered my plans for tomorrow. According to the weather forecast, the weather is going to be bad all week, and there are no good camping sites on the route. I was considering many things, but I decided to run to Koriyama and stay at the internet cafe again. As I'm not hurry tomorrow, I decided to go slowly, although there is a distance. There seems to be hot springs and I will be able to relax. Well, I don't necessarily care about camping. The city is already close, and if there is a good campsite within a good distance, I will use it. I don't want to camp in the public park now because of the bad weather, so I'll do it some other time.
There are not many cyclists to meet. I only passed one person today.

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北上運動公園キャンプ場から仙台 140km

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