SW2023 D4 Kinugawaonsen - Nikko

Route: Kinugawaonsen - Nikko
Bicycle: 33 km

Train: 160 km
Average speed: 11,5 km/h
Total ascent: 537 m
Riding time: 2:50 h
Weather: Sun, some clouds, still too hot and humid, 26C (per Wahoo)

For the last day of this rather short Silver Week (only the Monday was a public holiday... but I took the Tuesday as well), I had originally planned to cycle from Kinugawa onsen up to lake Chuzenji, the lake above Nikko and then down through the mountains to Kanuma and take a train from there back to Tokyo. However my stomach wasn't happy with me and it was still sooooo hot and humid... that I changed my plan and did sightseeing in Nikko instead. 

The main shrine, Toshogu was incredibly busy with school classes. I arrived there around 10:00 and there was one class after an other. Probably all from the same school. Maybe it was just bad timing. But I do remember a visit a few years ago to Nikko where this same shrine was also totally overwhelmed by Japanese tourist groups. I know this is an important Shrine for its history, but with so many groups it is hard to enjoy it. 

Strangely it got much quieter up to the burial of the Tokugawa shogun and on the way down I took this very quaint picture of the roofs of all the shrine buildings shining in their golden splendor through the forest. 

Nearly all tourists are gathered at this one spot and although the Nikko Futarasan jinja is only a few meters walking away, over there everything was very quiet. 

It even had a deity for patisserie chefs (the god is holding the branch of a specific citrus tree). 

I had lunch closeby in an other soba place (a lot of soba and udon these past few days) and then returned to my bicycle. 

It was still relatively early in the day, but I was clearly not in form to continue cycling so instead I had found an onsen on google maps. It was quite close (by bicycle) from the shrines, but in a very quiet area. So quiet, that the onsen doesn't have a reception desk. But rather a vending machine for the tickets and a small box in which to drop the ticket before entering the bath. It has a tub inside and a rotenburo with views of a garden. I had the entire onsen to myself for most of the time. Very relaxing indeed. 

The ride today was quite short, only about 28 km, but it seemed more exhausting that I would have expected for such a short ride, even with the heat... however looking at Strava shows over 500 m of elevation, which were accumulated in less than 20 km of cycling (the initial part was downhill). So that's pretty steep (for me at least), however it wasn't anywhere so steep that it actually felt steep or that I needed to push the bike. 

SW2023 D3 Aizuwakamatsu - Kinugawaonsen

Route: Aizuwakamatsu - Kinugawaonsen
Bicycle: 101 km
Average speed: 17,6 km/h
Total ascent: 1,192 m
Riding time: 5:44 h
Weather: Sun, some clouds and a few drops of rain, still quite hot and humid, 26C (per Wahoo)

After the ride yesterday, cut short by the heat, I was a little bit worried about today’s rather long and mountainous ride. However, I had planned the ride to be along a train line that also connects Aizuwakamatsu to Kinugawa onsen. Those trains aren’t very frequent, so yesterday evening I wrote down on a small piece of paper, the possible connections that could save me from the heat, exhaustion, or other impediments to continue all the way to my goal. But finally, I made it all the way! The ride was partially on a secondary roads, slowly sloping up towards the border between Fukushima and Tochigi Prefecture through a landscape bordered on all sides by mountains as far as your could look. 

I hadn’t really realized before, just how mountainous Japan really is. I know this sounds crazy. I’ve been living here, for more than 4 years. I’ve been traveling a lot, but still it surprises me just how many mountains there are. 

Pouring water over me at regular intervals helped to keep my body temperature in an okay range. Also, instead of thinking of it as of 100 km ride I was more looking at smaller targets: the next convenience store, lunch, the next major town. 

Some of the roads were very small countryside roads while others were more busy, none of them really too busy but if you know how empty the street could be every truck seems to be one too many. There was also a fair number of tunnels both up and down hill, but it was all okay.

On the way down to Kinugawaonsen, I did run into this group of monkeys. It seemed an entire family, maybe 20 or so, even including a mother monkey with a small baby. 

The hotel in Kinugawaonsen (Itoen) however was quite bad. I mean, it was cheap... and had a rotenburo, but clearly nothing had been renovated in that hotel since 20 - 30 years, so essentially since it was build during the bubble years. It is a real pity, there are so many onsens towns that have been utterly destroyed by huge hotels that are now either completely abandoned or are in a severe state of disrepair / not well maintained. And these towns are very ugly. But still enough people go there to enjoy a day away, the onsen and dinner. Although in that hotel dinner was the worse of the worst. But yeah, I survived this as well and I had a very huge (but ugly and slightly unclean) room. 

SW 2023 D2 - Around Aizuwakamatsu

Route: Around Aizuwakamatsu
Bicycle: 41 km

Average speed: 13.3 km/h
Total ascent: 341 m
Riding time: 3:03 h
Weather: Sunny, humid and definitely too hot for me, 31C

In principle I wanted to ride up to Ouchi Juku, an old post town on the way from Aizuwakamatsu to Edo, but it was way too hot for me. I had incorporated two other (minor) sightseeing spots into the  tour today... and at least I managed to visit those. 

The first stop of the day was a shrine I had found on google maps that looked interesting, and was on the way to Ouchi Juku... and more importantly today, in an area with old, tall, shade-providing trees. 

And right today there was a very small temple festival ongoing. With elderly men dancing, singing and playing the flute, and a very young boy (the grandson of the flute player) playing the drum with great enthusiasm, experience and energy. 

The show of sake under the 交通安全 (Road safety) sign was a bit surprising. But I guess also sake needs to be transported safely. I stayed at this shrine and its surrounding small forrest for quite some time, before going for a soba lunch in a very small, very village, restaurant, which crucially had air conditioning. By this time I had decided to give up on Ouchi juku (still too hot and now also too late) and was actually contemplating to return directly to Aizuwakamatsu... but then continued to the second attraction of the day. A temple up on a hill overlooking the fertile plains around Aizu Wakamatsu. 

Plains knowns for their fruit cultivations. On the way to the temple I passed a fruit processing plant that also sold directly to customers (quite typical in Japan) and got a peach. I had left it to the saleslady to select the right peach for me. She choose a rather hard one (hard like an apple), which however was very tasty. While I was standing outside eating it, an other employee (or maybe the owner) came, and gave me an other huge peach that had some small damage (so probably they couldn't sell it) that was softer and more juicy... but I found the harder one more delicous. 

The temple did remind me a bit of Kiyomizudera in Kyoto... only that this one only gets a few visitors a day, has a much nicer view and even a small cave behind the temple. 

Cycling back to Aizu Wakamatsu I could see that it was raining in the distance and it seems that in Wakamatsu itself it had rained very heavily... but I only got the rainbow: 

SW2023 D1 Koriyama - Aizuwakamatsu

Route: Koriyama - Lake Inawashiro - Aizuwakamatsu 
Bicycle: 82 km
Average speed: 15,4 km/h
Total ascent: 873 m
Riding time: 5:20 h
Weather: Sun, some clouds and still very hot and humid (Wahoo says 27C, but definitely was more)

I planned this trip a few weeks ago when I hoped that by mid September the temperature would be a bit cooler. And while it is definitely cooler than at the peak of the heat in August it is still very hot. But finally cyclable. 

My bike also was in repairs over the summer so it’s the first longer ride in a long time. 

I started yesterday after work and went already (by Shinkansen) to Koriyama, so that I could get an “early” start today. Finally it wasn’t that early, but still early enough to do everything I had planned for today. 

Koriyama is one of those very ugly Japanese cities with a lot of new (and not so new anymore) buildings that don’t create one city together but just a bunch of ugly buildings interrupted by a lot of car parks around the station. 

I cycled out of the city and up and up a relatively quiet road. Which at one point looked frighteningly steep, but actually wasn’t that steep and perfectly cyclable. 

Once up the rest was downhill / flat just with a little bit of up and down at some points along the lake. I went straight down to the lake in the expectation to find (a lot) of restaurants, but that wasn’t the case. It was mainly ample camping areas around the lake. Mostly fir people doing “day camping”. (Not sure if that’s a thing outside of Japan, but here it is quite widespread. People go to some nature location, build up a huge tent of just a shade, bring thousands of things with them: foldable chairs, tables, BBQ sets, has cookers, food, cutlery… the list seems endless and the cars full with stuff. Often it seems that even the cars are specific for transporting all this camping equipment. So while I didn’t find a restaurant by just going to the beach, google maps came to my rescue and found a place really close by. 

From there I continued my ride on the west side of the lake sometimes was really nice views over the lake and the mountains behind it. This lake is the fourth largest in Japan, I’ve already done the full circle off the first, second and third largest lake, but not of this one. I did a little bit under half of the lake, because my goal was a Aizuwakamatsu for today.

Along the way, I also saw these small white flowers, which kind of look like a white version of rape. However, I learned on the next day that they are soba, buckwheat. 

After a very nice and gentle descend from the lake, down to Aizuwakamatsu, yes, the lake is above the city. I made a stop at Sazae temple to see its special pagoda, which is constructed as a double helix. You can actually visit inside and go up and down in one sweep. 

I knew that the castle was going to close at 5:00 and last entrance was at 4:00, so I thought I was a little bit late, but actually, it was not very far and generally downhill from the temple to the castle, so I made it in absolutely good time, no hurry and could visit the castle as well today. As so many castles, also, this one was reconstructed only after the second world war. It got original destroyed sometime in the 19th century, but not during any war but apparently rather as a planned demolition of the castle. There were even pictures how it looked like before the demolition, and it didn’t look like it was ready for demolition, but that’s what they did. Only to rebuild it, this time in concrete, about 100 years later. But they did a reasonably nice job, and specially from the outside it is very scenic.

Inside is a museum, all in Japanese, about the history of the region, the samurais, the wars that were fought and lost around Aizu, and the helmets of the samurais, which must have inspired the designer of Darth Vader. 

From the castle it was a short ride to my guest house, where I will be staying for two nights. With all the heat, I was obviously drenched in sweat, but found very a nice onsen / sento close to Wakamatsu station, which had an incredible number of different pools, some of them outside some inside, with different waters and all this at the very cheap price of only ¥450. And I was early enough to finally get an Akasuri (Korean body exfoliation), which I had hoped to do a few months ago back when I was cycling around Fuji lake, but didn’t manage to get an appointment.