Archive | Japan by Bicycle

The act of standing at the monument on Japan’s northernmost tip is not overwhelmingly significant. However, if you arrive having cycled the length of the country as we did, it is quite exciting.

With one day left, we all have a bit of a bittersweet feeling about the approaching end…

Ride along as the pedals push themselves, the wind is always at your back, and the slopes always roll downhill. This is zen riding…

Had I foreseen that the car ahead of me would stop so abruptly, I wouldn’t have slammed my bike and body into it’s rear door…

Being on the road for 6 weeks has really illustrated how many comforts you can pare away from daily life and still get by, and also which comforts are essential to happiness.

In many ways, biking Japan has been like playing a video game. Having now finished Honshu Island completely, it is time to head to the final boss arena.

In a way, it really does feel as if I am biking home with just over a week until the trip is over. Naturally I have mixed feelings about this.

For the second half of today the team did not cycle as usual. Typcially Dylan leads, Scott rides behind him, and I am in the third position. Sometimes …

There is a trick to cycling 140 plus kilometers in one day. It has little to do with fitness or cycle maintenance.

This is not like us. It’s only 4pm, yet we’ve already made our milage for the day and it appears I’ll also be able to post this before dark. It’s somewhat odd, a little unnerving…

Sitting outside a 7-11 near Kashiwazaki this evening, trying not to throw up, I reflected on the day, wondering if things could have gone any worse.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had images of the Japanese Alps being impossibly steep vertical inclines and frosty peaks.

When you start every day by packing up your life onto a bike, and then you get on it and ride 100 km away, it’s hard to develop a sense of home.

The aquarium had the basic colorful treasures that never fail to amaze the eyes of land-lubbers. Right as we entered, however, there were a few pleasant surprises …

“If you don’t like the weather, just wait 2 hours, enjoy an hour of peace, and then expect it to get worse for the rest of the day.” It wasn’t a bad day, but it would be a bad night.

There are a few items that we absolutely cannot bicycle Japan without. An item we each carry that is debatable is our wallets…

As Pizza Marino discovered, “All you can eat” are dangerous words to say to a team of mid 20s men who cycle all day everyday. Today didn’t get interesting until after dark. …

Dylan was running headlong into the lake naked. And I was filming. The day had been humid starting in the morning when we awoke in our honest-to-goodness bamboo forest campsite…

We’re having fun, I swear.

Maybe because of its overwhelming options, Kyoto is a very difficult city to tour well.

Hills, you get back on the other side. Headwinds are balanced out by tailwinds. But braking, that takes all your energy, and wastes it in useless sound and heat.

It’s not everyday that super exciting stuff happens. With that in mind, this post will be relatively concise as we had somewhat of a low-key day. After finding our couchsurfing host Jody’s apartment building last night, we were delighted to be given access to the building’s multipurpose “Library” room. Complete with kitchenette, bathroom, and even [...]

The idea of finding Towa Tei, one of my favorite DJs, at a show in his native country was in the back of my mind when I booked my flight to Japan. Never did I think it would happen. …

When I heard that there was a 7-bridge, island-hopping highway system between Honshu and Shikoku, I was sold. …

It should be more difficult to smell myself while outdoors, under a bridge no less. Yet here I was. Try as I might, I could no longer keep telling myself that “dogs must live around here.” …

Trust is both highly fragile and critically valuable. …

Divide and conquer. The Scooby-Doo gang always uses this strategy to solve a case. Let’s hope that it works for Japan by Bicycle.

The optimisim was now thoroughly gone, replaced by a grim determination to reach Hiroshima tonight …

We left several things behind today. …

Days 10 and 11: 0 km and 0 km. Unfortunately I’m getting used to this and it may be difficult to get back on the bike tomorrow. Still, my fingers are crossed that the doctor will …

Breaking up is hard to do…

Grating skin off with asphalt doesn’t hurt at the time. This my seem strange, but after extensive investigation, I can attest that it is true. Only several seconds later …

Today, I took a crash course examining the difference between bruising road rash and broken bones. …

We awoke this morning to a car parking a foot away from our tent. When packed, we rolled down the steep hillside a pedaled down a few blocks to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

Nagasaki’s natural coastal beauty can be deceptive if traveling by car…

The day itself was a reasonable mix of … good and bad.

When looking for a good campsite around 6:45pm, a kind lady from the Philippines with a Japanese husband and family invited us into her home…

This is my first time couchsurfing, and it’s turning out to be as great as we all imagined during the 50 km ride in the rain to Iwagawa, where Topher lives and teaches English as a JET.

I didn’t plan to start out this way. I’ve had the notion for several years to propel myself (either on foot or bicycle) from one end of Japan to the other.

I heard the monkeys before I saw them. Yakuzaru, the monkeys of Yakushima. I was five hours into my whirlwind, 25-hour tour of the inland mountains, and I had almost forgotten …

After biking about 5km up to the trailhead, Andrew and I were really ready for some easier adventuring. It didn’t take long for us to realize that …

At 4 am this morning, Dylan, Scott, and I departed from Lori’s apartment on our bicycles after staying up all night packing and prepping.