Ride Report: Ise

Total distance: 80km

Rolled out this morning after about 12 hours of sleep. At 10am it was already quite hot out. The cloudiness from Nagoya has completely dissipated now, and the temperature was around 32C (90F) by the time I stopped for a break around 11am.

The road, still route 23, was still nicely paved, wide (two lanes each way plus space for bikes) and blissfully free of broken glass. Got some nashi (asian pear) juice during the break -- really refreshing!

Since this is a round trip, I got to ride without the trailer. (Kind of feels like an engine upgrade, makes it easy to accelerate from a stop or climb up bridges.) Within about two hours I'd cleared the 40km to Ise and was pulling into the outer Ise shrine.

The Ise shrines are supposed to be some of the holiest places in Shinto, and are dedicated to Amaterasu-omikami (nerd reference -- this is the same as the deity who's the main character in the PS2 game Okami). The shrines are in beautiful condition, partly due to the huge amount of care they put into it, mainly due to the custom of tearing down and rebuilding the whole thing every twenty years, simbolizing the cicle of death and renewal. So the shrines I got to see today were actually the 61st incarnations of those shrines. They're still built to the same specifications as the originals, supposedly, and their design is unique among all shrines. Each shrine has an equally sized, mostly empty spot next to it, where the next shrine will be built before the current one is torn down. Over the generations, the shrine switches between the two sites. The only thing that stays constant is the center post in each site. It's not removed or destroyed; instead, they build a tiny wooden "hut" around it before taking down the shrine around it. The hut only gets removed once the next shrine is built on top of it, so the center posts are never visible to the outside. The next rebuild is due for 2013.

Uncharacteristically for Japan, some areas of the shrine do not allow photography. Although heavily patrolled by security, it was interesting to note that they only wrote "no photography" in Japanese on the signs... I wonder if they just don't get very many foreign tourists here, given that it's out of the way and has a much greater spiritual and historical signficance than it has postcard appeal...

The inner and outer shrines are about 5km away from each other, so once I was done strolling around the beautiful woods surrounding the outer shrine, I headed in the direction of the inner shrine till I found a nice looking italian restaurant that served me some pizza and really icy water and let me sit in the a/c for a while. :)

Another 4km brought me to the Inner Shrine (Naiku). This one is significantly bigger than the Outer Shrine, although the layout is very similar. The Inner Shrine is also where all the tourists go, apparently, for unlike the Outer Shrine, this one was packed with flocks of tourists (though still hardly any foreigners, and no signs in any language other than Japanese... gotta give them credit, even 'bathrooms, this way' looks good when written in Japanese calligraphy on a wooden sign).

The inner shrine is set along a creek at the foot of the mountains, and although it also has wooded areas, it has much more of a landscape than the Outer Shrine, with gorgeous mountains in the background. I picked up a mango shaved ice from a store that had an absolutely dizzying number of flavors for shaved ice and followed the throngs for a tour of the Inner Shrine.

With everyone there, it wasn't a meditative experience, but it was beautiful and nevertheless inspiring. Having been to some of the most important spiritual sites in Europe, I really enjoyed being somewhere so full of light and trees and water and people laughing and generally having a good time enjoying the beauty of the surroundings.

Around 4pm, having made the full rounds, I chugged an iced tea and started on my way back to Ise. The weather was beautiful -- still sunny, but the temperature was already dropping to a more comfortable range (sun sets between 6 and 7pm around here... also rises around 5am). The headwind from this morning was still around, but this time as a tailwind it helped me zoom along, returning the strength it had sapped in the morning's ride.

Along the way, tractors tilled the fields with flocks of white birds happily plocking along behind the blades.

Made it back to the ryokan riding on the tailcoat of the last of today's daylight and headed straight for the bath to scrub off the road grime (the stuff collects really fast on top of sunscreen) and soak my muscles. And now, for some dinner. :)

Ride Report: Nagoya to Tsu

Total ride distance: 85km

It was cloudy as I rolled out of downtown Nagoya this morning. Within the city center, the roads were comfortably wide, althogh the traffic lights at every intersection slowed me down a good bit. Early on the ride there was a bit of rain spitting down from the sky, but by lunch time the sky had cleared completely.

As I found route 1 and followed it southwest out of Nagoya, the road gradually narrowed and the sidewalk turned into the more common collection of potholes, traffic signs, cones and random bumps that characterizes the shoulder of most roads around here, so my pace continued unabashedly slow through largely uninteresting low density city areas. Occasionally a larger intersection had an overpass for pedestrians and no pedestrian crosswalk. The first one I came to, I hauled bike and trailer up, over and down the other side. Having thoroughly proven to myself that that was a far more hazardous venture than just following traffic across instead, I ignored overpasses after that.

After two long bridges (both of which had nice cycling paths separated from the car traffic by several inches of solid steel), got to Kuwana, where the road widened again and I found a nice cafe to grab some lunch and rest during the hottest hour of the day.

Right after lunch, found a bike shop and finally got some chain lube. (I'd been borrowing some from the team before, and the suff we had wasn't very water resistant, so it had all washed off in the downpour in Tokyo.) My chain had been quite unhappy, so cleaning and lubricating it made it feel like I was riding a new bike. :)

Soon after, the path I mapped shifted from Route 1 to 23, which goes along the coast till Tsu. If navigating 1 had been tricky, then (excuse nerd reference) 23 was like doing the Deathstar trench run on a B-Wing. Instead of enemy fire, I was dodging the ridiculous amount of broken glass on the road. The cycling area itself wove in and out, up and down, passed through one tunnel with a 1.6m clearance (wtf? I'm 1.76m tall, for reference), randomly disappeared into patches of grass or shot off away from the highway and didn't tell anyone how to get back, and a few times ended inside some random factory's parking lot, leaving some gate guards rather puzzled as to while a touring bike was leaving the factory...

Got a nice reprieve when said path dropped completely away from 23 and landed on 6 for a few km. A much nicer route, with less traffic and more space to bike, not to mention less broken glass. By the time I rejoined 23, it had turned into a full highway with a nice, unused frontage road. Also met a stiff headwind at that point, but since I didn't have to deal with ADD paths, broken glass, potholes or traffic, it was still quite pleasant. :)

The last part of the ride went by fairly quickly, and soon I was passing that weird zone just outside a bigger city where all the outlet malls and big chain stores plunk themselves (yea, it's just the same in Japan now as in the US). Stopped for directions a couple of times to zero in on my ryokan and was comfortably installed in a very nice 8-mat room before 5:30pm. The place is really hard to find, which may explain why it was so cheap ($30/night).

Now for some dinner and a good night's sleep. Tomorrow I head with the bike unloaded to Ise and back.

Arrived in Tsu

Beautiful riding weather, though mostly city riding. Now safely in a ryokan, full update soon.

The Mexican

You know you're in Japan when you're at a pub called The Mexican, the waitstaff is wearing black cowboy outfits, the decor involves victorian chandeliers with orange lighting, the beer on tap is Kirin, and Black Eye Peas is playing. :)

PS: You know you've been in Japan for a while when it takes you 30 minutes to notice the place is actually named "Mexigan". I asked them about it, it's actually on purpose, and apparently the reason why the waitstaff has gun holsters on their belts (filled with those pre-packaged moist napkins used in restaurants here).

Puns aside, it's actually a really nice place to hang out. The staff was awesome and gave me all kinds of tips on what to eat and what to see in Nagoya. They just opened a few days ago, so if you're around Nagoya's Sakae area, definitely check them out. :)

Going to the Movies

Since yesterday was such a windy, rainy day, I figured I'd engage in the time-honored tradition of spending part of those days at the movies. Having picked a japanese animation movie, I went up to the cashier, who proceeded to cram about eight paragraphs of information and questions into about two minutes. It roughly boiled down to finding out my preferred seating area in the theater and assigning me a specific seat, for which I proceeded to cough up about $18. Ouch.

Having my seat already secured, I knew I could take my time, since I didn't need to fight the crowd of about 9 other people who were also watching a movie aimed at kids on what happens to be the first Monday of the Japanese school year. I eventually installed myself on seat H18 just in time to catch the beginning of the commercials. At that theater, there weren't any ads like in most US theaters, and they contented themselves in alternating short clips of puppies playing (yea, it was cute) and random informational clips (gems such as "don't trip on the stairs", "don't kick the chair in front of you", and the more usual "in case of fire here's what we hope you'll do instead of panicking and hiding under your folding seat"). That was followed by maybe 3 or 4 trailers for upcoming movies, and before we knew it, the feature film. All in all, most enjoyable if rather pricey.

As far as flasbacks go, I guess this one is right up there with biking in the rain. Last movie I saw in Japan, twelve years ago, was a japanese animation (Princess Mononoke, from Ghibli Studios; it had just come out, so my seat preference then had been boiled down to "what's still available", which turned out to be a seat roughly 3 inches from the projection screen... I mostly remember the characters being reeeeeally tall, with tiny heads).

Just Biking in the Rain

It had been a while since I'd biked through one of Japan's torrential typhoon-level downpours. Twelve years, in fact.
Last time I had no waterproof gear (I'm not counting the umbrella, since that gave up and ran for cover whimpering when faced with the wind that day), and must have been quite an amusing sight by the time I made it home, given how long it took my host Mom to control the giggles after seeing me drip into the entrance hallway.
This time, I have full rain gear (worked quite nicely, my clothes and hair stayed dry in spite of being under a waterfall for a good hour straight), my shoes are sandals and attach to the bike pedals (so no slipping off), and I have strong lights on the bike. However, I'm also carrying every possesion I have in Japan with me in a trailer behind the bike. (The trailer is mostly waterproof... it did leak a bit underneath, I'm guessing where the axle connects to the suitcase.)
I made the trip from Shinbashi to Asakusa with no trouble (though I'm not as much a fan of the pedestrian dodging game on a bike as I used to be in High School), checked into a hostel for the next two nights, and now I'm tucked into a restaurant booth cuddling a cup of hot tea.
Some lessons learned: my bike bell doesn't make much of a useful sound when it's waterlogged (but whistling works ok in all but the worst downpours); wet polished metal is slippery (and having four wheels is more stable than just having two); people in Tokyo do a great job of not noticing that I'm biking with a big trailer behind me while at the same time managing to dodge me, the bike and the trailer; the ubiquitous transparent plastic umbrella is really useful when trying to navigate crowded streets in Tokyo's diagonal or horizontal rains (people who couldn't see through their umbrellas did remarkably poorer on dodging).
Also, hot tea makes everything better. :)

Smell the Roses

One very warm weekend a bit ago heralded the blooming of the roses in our garden. Just wanted to share one of them.

Even when life is crazy, and it feels like we're doing nothing but trying to keep up, somehow there's always time to stop and admire the incredible beauty that is right by us.

The trick is remembering to look.