NY2024 - D4 exploring around Fushimi and on to Uji

Route: Kyoto - Fushimi - Uji and back
Bicycle: 58 km
Total ascent: 532 m
Average Speed: 14.7 km/h
Riding time: 3:56 h
Weather: sun, clouds, rain all mixed, 6 C

In theory the weather forecast for today was no rain from the morning... but that wasn't really true. It was rainy in the morning, so I had a slow and late start. When I finally got going around 10:30 it kind of had stopped raining, but the roads were wet after a night of rain. My plan was to ride to the tea fields behind Uji, a ride a tried (from Nara) about a year ago, and was also stopped by rain. This time it wasn't only the rain that did put a stop to this plan, but also an intriguing roof ridge I saw on a hill, and decided to investigate:

The (rebuilt) castle of Fushimi. Very quiet place.

From there it wasn't far to a shrine on the same hill and the mausoleum of the Meiji emperor.

Weather today was very changing, sunny in one minute, grey in the next and a few rain drops soon after, just to return to sun or clouds again. Anyway, the rain was never strong enough to really get wet. Luckily as it's cold. 

After exploring the sights on this hill I continued my preplanned route towards Uji, and before I knew it was at Uji station. By then it was a bit after 12:00 so I decided to have lunch in Uji, in a family restaurant, considering that Uji is too touristy for normal restaurants plus it is 1st of January, so most normal restaurants are closed. While eating it rained again, and I also realized that my full plan was not achievable. So I replanned the route and shortened it a bit. It still went a bit uphill, and still contained one tea plantation.

Back through built up area, until I was down on the bicycle road along Kizugawa. Not the best ride through built up area, specially after the enjoyment of nature the first 2 days in Northern Kyoto. Not really bad... but just not really enjoyable either. Once on the river, there is the typical river cycling lane linking to the cycling lane on a few other rivers and back to my hotel. While I was cycling I heard my phone beeping. The typical beep of the alert system. After a while it beeped again and again. So I checked what had happened. I already suspected that it was an earthquake, and I was right. A rather major earthquake (shindo 7) in Ishikawa prefecture, with tsunami warnings for practically the entire Japan sea coast. Back in the hotel I watched a bit of television, where they were saying continuously "evacute now... don't leave it to later, evacuate now to higher places ... a tsunami is coming ... evacuate now..." Luckily there is some time between an earthquake and the inbound tsunami, so hopefully most people will have had enough time to evacuate to somewhere a bit higher. Now, about 6 hours later, and a multitude of strong aftershocks in the area, they continue to ask people to evacuate for the tsunami. So far however it seems that there haven't been a lot of injured people. But we will see in the next days. The announcer on the television at least seems to be well prepared. Assuming that he is sitting in Tokyo, the helmet is really only show.