The Himedomachi Cycling Club

I bade farewell to Hakodate, a town I hadn’t expected to like but which I ended up liking very much. I cycled towards the port along flyovers that rose to the tenth story of the high rises. Piles of lumber waiting at the port. Rusted pontoons, trawlers, three giants docks, two for freight, one for passengers. I managed to lose the passenger terminal for a while, my anxiety sky-rocketing until it appeared eventually behind some warehouses, just across from the Vegas Vegas panchinko parlour.

As I waited for the ferry a 75 year old motorcyclist came over to ask me where I’m from.

“Oh, the UK. I used to work for Dunlop.”

I asked him what he was doing and he said he said he and his friend were motorcycling around Hokkaido, although it would be his friend’s last trip as he had trouble with his hip. He thought about it and said, “We’ve done 13,000 kilometres.”

Counting between English and Japanese is complicated as 10,000 is a unit of measurement in Japanese making an English million one hundred, ten thousands.

He maybe raised his mistake as he said, “On Honshu we’re doing another 18 hundred. We’re ending up in Kobe.”

He had bought twelve abandoned houses, renovated them and rented them out. He patted one of the pouches on his motorcycle jacket. “Pocket money,” and we talked about Japan’s aging population and what it would do without immigration. Unlike other conversations, he seemed realistic about Japan’s chances of getting out of its current hole.

I should have waxed my boots on the ferry but instead I slept, having been woken up several times in the night by other guests. I went to the car deck and collected my bike, where it had been leant against a large Mickey Mouse towel and strapped against a wall. I was the first off, and I cycled into sunshine.

Hokkaido road builders do love a good straight line. In Aomori the roads are curved and overhung by trees. I found myself in a pine forest. There were needles on the ground and all around me frogs croaked.

I cycled 13 kilometres down the coast to Sai. It was a small coastal village but was thriving, with a couple of supermarkets and restaurants and a cake shop. I compared it to Bakkai, a village about the same distance from Wakkanai, not even a village, a collection of semi-derelict houses around a fishing port and nothing else. Sai was thriving. It had a couple of restaurants, small supermarkets, a cake shop.

I checked my phone, Jared was only 55 kilometres away, so I bought some cake, got a free coffee and settled down on a bench to wait. He’d be there in less than a hour and I was looking forward to him carrying my stuff up Fear Mountain.

I wiped the cake crumbs off my lips and checked again, he was further away. What could he be doing? In fact, he had been 55 kilometres away as the crow flies. To cold and have some cake he’d have to drive 150 kilometres. I wasn’t sure I could eat that much cake.

Osorenzan – the characters reading Fear Mountain – from the cyclists perspective is actually three climbs of 5km, 8km and 2km through a first. A sign at the bottom reads in Japanese, “Heaven is closer than you think.” I passed an elderly man who had been out picking food and he had a bear bell. Although the Japanese Black Bear is much smaller than the brown bear, I had my bell on my bike and, after a certain amount of consideration, not thrown away my spray.

I started the climb, passing a dead snake just like Alan did. Down a long straight stretch three monkeys crossed the road in front of me, then a fourth joined them and they watched with curiosity as I buzzed passed. There was almost no traffic. Two forestry workers walked along the road trailing bells. A light drizzle cooled my arms.

The woods were beautiful, mossy trees and shallow brooks. I followed the Ohata River for a while, then started the second climb. Just after going over the summit I heard a car coming towards me. It was beeping its horn into the blind corners just like I had been ringing my bell. The car stopped, the driver rolled down his window and said to me in perfect English, “There’s a bear on the road.”

“How far away?”

“About a kilometre.”

“Just sitting on the road?”

“Yes.”

“Can you wait while I call my friend?”

I called Jared. He was at Bodaiji, just a few kilometres away and 10 minutes later he chugged around the corner in a tiny K-car which we managed to squeeze Ribena into one I’d taken off her wheels. Nothing beats a burly Canadian who has bears in his back garden. We drove to the temple.

The drum bridge is still there, although it’s gated off and you can’t walk on it. The sky was heavy with clouds with the rain that was about to fall, but the atmosphere Booth talked about was absent that day. A tour bus arrived and a flag waving guide escorted a line of tourists into the precinct. All that remained were diluted echoes of fear among the well demarcated car park, the souvenir stand, the toilet block. Two mysterious huts in which water pooled and only female bathers were allowed, a black rock that streamed, the smell of sulphur, the small shrines to the dead children with hand held windmills spinning in the breeze.

The heavens opened so we beat it back to the car. Another tourist bus arrived. We drove the last kilometres to the hotel. We had a reservation in The Only Ryokan in Town.

TORT was run by a short man with sagging cheeks and a stooped demeanor and a cluttered foyer. He lead us down a corridor stacked with cardboard boxes as if he was still deciding what to take to the tip and what to keep.

Jared bought some beer but we decided to open it later. He was fighting a 16-hour jet lag. In the dining room – also filled with junk – an elderly woman with a single tooth and a grandmotherly manner showed us where to sit. It was a meal of small items – fish in breadcrumbs, fried fish, cucumber, beans and meat in a sauce, miso, rice and something rooty wrapped in kelp that left an unpleasant after taste. Half a dozen men were eating and drinking at another table. One of them asked us what we thought of Bodaiji. I said it had a mysterious atmosphere – funiki. He heard – tenki – weather and decided to ignore us after that, either because we hadn’t appreciated the atmosphere properly or thinking we spoke little Japanese.

Twenty years ago we would have stayed up late and chatted. We drank a beer, didn’t open the snacks and were asleep by 8pm. A big day for two old men.