Where am I?

After I returned from Cape Sata I opened the sliding doors in the room where I was staying and dangled my feet over the edge, watching the rain come down and eating Ritz crackers.

I’d read the Ride Far Blog before coming. The author had experience cycling the self-supported, ultra-distance Transcontinental Race across Europe. He said that most racers felt small moments of euphoria in the days leading up to the finish, rather than huge euphoria at the end. I suppose I was waiting for the euphoria. Instead I felt like I could sit on that step for days with a perfectly empty mind. There was no thinking about and preparing for the miles of riding the following day. Wake up times, routes, provisions, arrivals. I sat there for so long in my wet kit that I felt a bum-shaped water stain on the old wooden floor. The owners had been indifferent to me – just another person on their way to Sata, heard that story before. There were plenty of other stains on the floor and I just did not care. Not anti-climax, tiredness. I’d cycled 600k and climbed 6000m in 6 days, and was spent.

I left the next morning and took the ferry, I thought to Ibusuki, the hot sand beaches, but actually to Yamagawa, a mistake I only realised when I couldn’t find Ibusuki station. A slow train took me to Kagoshima, a Shinkansen to Kumamoto.

It was extremely humbling to whizz through the chunk of Kyushu in an hour that had taken me three days to cycle. Yatsushiro where I’d visited the shrine and had a fight with a hornet, passed in about a minute, then we were virtually in Kumamoto.

Julian was waiting for me at the station. We put Ribena in the back and drove towards Amakusa. I had prayed for sun and instead got drizzle.

“Are you going to cycle over the bridge?” he asked me.

That was my original plan. The ferry and train timetables had other ideas.

“For Instagram? I don’t think so.”

We stopped at Isola Terrace, a modern shopping and tourist area where you can bike, look at dolphins, eat and enjoy the view. Despite Amakusa’s relative obscurity and population decline, the place was thriving. I had expected akiya and empty businesses, but the towns we passed through – Oyano, Matsushima, Hondo were more or less as I’d remembered them, much to my relief.

We had an onsen in Matsushima – Julian knew the woman who works there. We chatted in the outside bath, about the undiscovered wonders of Amakusa – the lagoons, the nature, the people. Julian said, “On your blog, say there are piranhas.”

We went to the Hondo Budokan. A kendo training had just finished. My teacher was there, as well as other people I know. We bought coffee and sat around and chatted.

Someone said to me, “Of all the foreigners who have done kendo, you’re the most passionate.”

“Others have tried it?”

“Yes. But they always give up. It hurts. It smells. It’s too tiring.”

“I’ve made good friends,” I said, in my clumsy Japanese.

When I came to Japan 25 years ago I was an angry, insecure young man with a slash and burn approach to friendship. I left a very different person, a lot of that due to Yamashita who taught me more than kendo. He showed me how to take responsibility.

“What’s it like being back,” Julian said.

“It’s like I left ten minutes ago.”

A wonderful sense of being back in the family.

Julian had thrown a party and the person who took over my position as an ALT in Himedo was there. She had married a Japanese man and stayed. We had friends, and enemies, in common, both of us curious about how the other’s life has been.

Julian lives in a converted akiya, which is now all warm wood and big widows. He grows vegetables and chops wood and thinks about how he’s going to make a room here or put a patio there. His wife is a teacher and his neighbours offer him wood, tools and the use of their fields. As he pointed out, Japan is a night country, when the lamps are lit and the yellow light comes through the fusama.

I’m staying with Yamashita tonight in Himedo and tomorrow I’ll cycle across the islands. I’m dreaming about an akiya of my own, with wooden floors, sunset views and trees in the garden. There’s a tiny airport here. I could invite cyclists to explore the island, as long as they don’t mind the piranhas.