The Himedomachi Cycling Club

I decided to take the coffee shop owner up on his offer and get to his shop at 8 to watch the hummingbirds and drink a coffee with him. I started getting my stuff together and thought, “Where’s my bike lock key?” Ribena was locked to a drainpipe in the hotel parking lot and I had no idea where I’d put the key.

“Don’t panic,” I told myself. “Pack your bag and it’ll turn up.”

I packed my bag – no key – so went down to Ribena and went through the bags I’d left on overnight. Still no key.

I went back to my room and searched everywhere with a torch with the panic rising. Still no key.

I thought back to yesterday. I’d had an onsen, a crepe, came back, locked Ribena up, returned to my room until I went out for supper. Had I left it at the restaurant?

I calmed myself down as best I could, one of my nightmares coming true. I was sure I could prove ownership, could I explain my predicament probably?

As I was getting ready to go out on what felt like a pointless errand, I remembered that I stopped on the 3rd floor on my way back to take a photo from the balcony. I raced downstairs and, sure enough, there it was, on an air conditioning unit.

I checked out with the two kind ladies on reception, and we had another chat.

“Have you seen any hotaru?” one of them asked.

“Hotaru?”

It was a word I had learned before but long since forgotten.

The woman stuck her bum out a bit and pointed to it.

“Hotaru.”

“Oh, fireflies. No, not yet!”

I went down, unlocked my bike, put on the saddle bag and did my ‘holy trinity’ check which I do whenever I leave anywhere.

Phone – credit cards – passport.

I couldn’t find my passport. It wasn’t in my money belt with my cash. Scrabbled around. It was in the back of my cycling jersey. OK, put it in the right place. Now, where is my front light.

I got to the café at 9am. All the birds were gone. The owner came out with his wife. He was in the middle of getting things ready. The moment had passed.

You’ll remember my nightmare on the 2 out of Hiroshima? Congested traffic and narrow roads. It had given me a valuable lesson. I think if Alan Booth was planning his walk today, he wouldn’t have chosen the same route. There are so many more cars now than in the 1970’s, many many more busy roads. He’d have used satellite technology and online maps to decide. It is probably bleedingly obvious to everyone, except me, that using descriptions written in the 70’s is an illogical way to go about things. The better question is to ask, “Which way would he have walked now?”

So I had scrapped my plan to follow him through Mine. Instead I would cycle along the bike park the Shin-Yamaguchi, turn west through Kotoshiba then more or less follow the small roads along the coast to Shimonoseki. I had mapped the route to the bike path, then the longer route all the way to my hostel.

I’ve been complaining a lot about my Garmin, here I’ll have to explain what’s wrong. I spent many hours, if not days, on my computer, on the Garmin website, planning my daily routes. Once I had my routes planned, I uploaded them to my Garmin device, the little GPS that sits on my handlebars. This works exactly like a car GPS, except there is a purple line superimposed on the map which is the route I’ve planned. Normally, the device tells me, for example, how far it is to the next left turn. It also recalculates back to my route if I deviate.

What I didn’t know is that my device doesn’t have a map of Japan. It can show me where I am in relation to the purple line. It shows major roads and railway lines, with various degrees of accuracy, but no rivers, no streets, no landmarks. It can’t recalculate a route or give me advance directions. I have to find the purple line and stay on it, or pull up Google maps on my phone if I get lost.

This is the problem I couldn’t solve in my container. This is how I’ve navigated for the last 2500+ kilometres. Find the purple line and stay on it.

Except the purple line in Yamaguchi was a long way from my hotel. I’d just cycle north, that would be fine. Cutting a long story short, it took me an hour and more than ten kilometres to find my route. I’d chosen the wrong map. When I loaded the correct one I saw I’d actually been in the right route about 30 minutes beforehand. I opened Google maps, navigated to it and finally, at 10.30, after a morning of mishaps, I was finally on the cycle path.

It followed the river, through a bamboo forest where an old lady was tying a bundle of green bamboo shoots 8-feet-long to a dilapidated bike. Under a road bridge, where a group of young people had spread a picnic on top of a tarpaulin. Back through the fields and into Shin-Yamaguchi.

A queue of people snaked around a convention centre and workers in hi-vis jackets kept them off the path. I wondered if it was a pop concert or a product launch and I stopped to ask a worker what was going on.

“It’s a bread and coffee exhibition,” he said, laughing through his mask at the absurdity. He unrolled a flyer to show me the stand map. One of the exhibitors was called Lovely Jubbly

 

My purple line took me far away from the traffic, it squeezed me through streets that could only fit one small car, along the coast where I could gaze at the sea from behind concrete walls and across bridges heavy with traffic, only the swerve off again on a wild adventure. The weather was glorious and, although I was wildly behind schedule, I loved every moment of it. This is how Alan Booth would have done it.

I was dying to see Kyushu and eventually, almost 100 kilometres later, there she was, just over the straits from Shimonoseki, all hazy blue mountains and pregnant with promise.

I checked into the hostel, concrete floors and a list of rules I had to download via a QR code. The receptionist apologised for the restaurant next door being closed. It sold deadly puffer fish so I wasn’t too disappointed.

I gave him my bear spray, asking him to give it to a northbound biker. Hopefully he will. He and his colleague were arsing around with it when I came down later

It was almost 7pm so I showered, did the washing, called home and went out for dinner at a sushi restaurant, my first of the trip. It was converter belt sushi (at tourist prices) so I took whatever looked nice, not always knowing what I had eaten. Shimonoseki is the main port for Japan’s whaling fleet and there was whale on the order menu. It only occurred to me later that I might have unknowingly pulled whale sushi from the belt.

I passed the fish market on the way back to the hotel, and looked across the strait to Kyushu. It put a spring in my step and I resolved to pack my bag, making sure I had everything, and get up early enough that I would be at the pedestrian tunnel when it opened at 6am. I wanted to get across Kitakyushu before it woke up.