The Himedomachi Cycling Club

When I arrived at the ryokan yesterday the lady put a thermometer to my forehead by way of greeting and checked my temperature. My room was on a long corridor and she turned the light off at eight. When I went to the bathroom, walking past rooms big enough for 18 guests, small floor lamps turned on automatically. It was very spooky and reminded me of Japanese ghost stories I had heard.

The next morning I had breakfast in the ‘dining room’, a guest bedroom for four people going by the characters on the door. Converted for the occasion as it was near my room and where the family lived. They had tidied the dishes away by the time I had popped into my room to grab my saddle bag. By 8.50 they were virtually pushing me out the door.

I only had 50 kilometres to do. I had to be in Atsumionsen by 3pm as I had agreed to meet some junior high school students who were going to interview the host about running a BnB and talk to me as a representative guest.

I passed a Lawson convenience store and, in a Pavlovian response, my bladder starting beeping, “Full! Full!” The way I look at it. These stores are great. For 200 yen or so you get toilets, air-conditioning, a chance to check your map, empty your rubbish and a free drink or sticky snack.

I stumbled upon the Shonai Cycling route and followed it into Tsuruoka, where kindergarten children were being rolled to the park inside one-story laundry cages, their little heads poking out the top. Shops sold fishing tackle and live bait and I saw my first McDonald’s sign since Wakkanai.

In the park, a group of workers were strimming the grass supervised by a shouting man in a white shirt who was pushing them where he wanted them. A couple of turtles sunned themselves on a rock in the park watched over by two young men smoking cigarettes. They stopped talking as I walked by them, then discussed the length of my legs.

The cycling path took me through a tunnel in the mountains and deposited me at the Sea of Japan. It went right, I went left, sad to part from it.

There was no traffic, but it still took two men with lightsabers to direct the nonexistent cars into the aquarium at Kamo.

Black rocks as jagged as cooled lava pocked the sea. Men sat in them fishing, their cars parked more or less off the highway.

At midday I stopped for ramen, hoping they’d have something other than ramen on the menu. The red, digital thermometers had crept up at 25. I ate soy sauce ramen and wished for cold soba. No other customers arrived while I was there. A small flag in the men’s toilet had the kanji for man written on it then underneath, sexe masculin man.

The road passed through a succession of tunnels, some through the headlands, others just for the sake of building a tunnel, it seemed. There were no rocks to avoid, no catastrophic snow, too low lying to protect against a tsunami. These tunnels seemed purely aesthetic.

The beauty of Atsumionsen surprised me. A river runs through it and carefully angled benches sit beneath shade giving trees. The shops are small independent affairs, with hand crafted signs and windows full of welcome signs. It’s a three road town and I got lost and me and my host, Mr Ueno, communicated by sending photos, mine of where I was and his of where he wanted me to go.

Three serious looking junior high school students interviewed him in Japanese. I learnt that he worked at the post office for twenty five years then trained as a chef. He couldn’t make ends meet and his parents had died and he felt he needed company. He raised money from the bank, from his family and through crowd sourcing and renovated the family home, which he otherwise would have abandoned. He now gets 200 or more guests a year and otherwise works part-time cleaning the onsen six days a week and giving the occasional cooking course to curious foreigners.

Halfway through the interview a monkey climbed into a tree and all the children, who had been shipped in for the day from the city to plant rice, shrieked.

Mr Ueno checked me in to demonstrate how it is done. He showed me a map of the town and pointed out the restaurants, grading them according to the attractiveness of the waiting.

I walked down the road to wash in the communal bath. I put my 300 yen in an honesty box and stepped into the changing area when a naked eighty-year-old huffed and puffed on a bench. The bath water smelt of sulphur and was scalding hot, so I turned on the cold tap and soaked beside it.

Mr Ueno and I walked to a Chinese restaurant in town and ate fried shrimp and gyoza. He and the owner exchanged their recent bear stories. She’d seen one up by the shrine and mistaken it for a man wearing a black mask.  He’d been charged by a mother bear when he was out foraging while two cubs climbed the trees. He seemed completely relaxed about it, not even bragging. The mother had turned at the last moment and run off.

We walked back to his house. The moon had risen over the mountains and he talked about all the foreigners who had stayed with him, and the ones that cancelled at the last minute.

Tomorrow I’m cycling to Niigata. It’s going to be hot and a long day so I’m planning to get up early. My body felt sluggish after a day off the bike. I hope it recovers by tomorrow.

I got a message from Jared who has arrived in Osaka: I found the young people!

I’ll call him soon. Wish him farewell, for now.