Weekend in Tohoku around Iwate-san

Day 1

Route: Morioka - Koiwai Farm - Hachimantai
Bicycle: 67 km
Train: 300 km
Average speed: 14,3 km/h
Total ascent: 1173 m
Riding time: 4:40h
Weather: Sunny, some clouds, 8C

For this weekend I signed up many months ago for a ride with a team of people from Osaka. They are doing regularly one day and weekend trips. Normally around Osaka… but sometimes also a bit further afield. The first time I joined them was in January this year, for a ride in Shizuoka prefecture. This month the ride was even further North. Around Morioka in Hachimantai area. 

We all met the evening before in Koriyama, had dinner... and some of us (not me though) did drink too much. But we had a lot of fun. The next morning was an early start to catch a Shinkansen further North to Morioka, a city where I had been years ago in my Tour of Japan. 

Riding out of Morioka first along a river and then through the countryside. Taking in the nice panorama and the occasional sakura tree still flowering. Actually not "still" flowering, but in their prime: the benefit of colder climate up in the mountains. 

We were really lucky with our hanami, as in most other parts in Northern Tohoku the flowers were already fading and on our train ride back to Tokyo there was a Japanese tour group of elderly tourists who went all the way to Hirosaki to see the famous cherry trees at the castle... just to see cherry blossoms well beyond their peak. 

We stopped at Koiwai farm, apparently a very well known farm for milk products, ...

... had lunch there (it was more like a snack and took an eternity, as the small restaurant outside of the farm wasn't equipped to handle that many orders at the same time) and then cycled to our second touristic highlight of the day. A solitary cherry tree with the backdrop of Mount Iwate: 

From there is was mainly downhillls... until it wasn't. Until a quite long and - looking now at the Strava file - apparently quite steep ascent up the slopes of the vulcano. However I made it up there, was even with the first people there and so had enough time to take in the volcanic landscape. 

We were rather late at this point, but from here onwards it was really downhill... but also really cold. I think my Wahoo showed -2C... But while moving it was okay. We arrived at our resort hotel, had time for a pre-lunch soak in the onsen and then off to buffet dinner, which included an entire mountain of crabs.

We had fun, again a few people did drink way too much... but miraculously the next day were still operational. 

Day 2

Route: Hachimantai - Shibutami 
Bicycle: 42 km
Train: 550 km
Average speed: 14,3 km/h
Total ascent: 571 m
Riding time: 2:31 h
Weather: Sunny, some clouds, quite windy, 9C

On day 2 we awoke to a cold but sunny morning, gazing out of our window on Mount Iwate and a cherry tree in full swing: 

The preannounced plan for the day was to ride up Aspite Line to see the snow wall along both sides of the street. I was quite worried about this part of the ride days earlier, after seeing this weather forecast that had the temperature at -20 C at the top! 

Officially the road was closed... but somehow at some point someone decided that it actually wasn't closed... and frankly, there were other cars going up and down. So it didn't really seem to be closed. 

However only a relatively small group (less than half of the group) attempted it... and it would have been a long ride up (and probably a very freezing and long ride down). So the ride leader decided after a few kilometers of cycling up hill (where it got actually quite warm... although it was cold) to take pictures and return down to join the others and go for lunch. In a certain way I was a bit disappointed because the initial "advertisement" for this ride was the snow wall... But it would have been a long ride up. We only made it up to an altitude shy of 800 m... and the highest point would have been around 1500 m. 

After lunch, we had an uneventful ride slowly downhills, made it to a first train station, where we decided to cycle to Morioka instead... but during the ride there (on a rather busy road) decided to call it a day and look for an other train station, right in time to avoid a major downpour. So all in all a good day. 

Before boarding the shinkansen back to Tokyo we had Morioka cold noodles, which seem to originate from Korea. Aparatenly there were a lot of immigrants from Korea after the war in Morioka. It was nice... but not really appropriate for a rather cold April day. But in summer it most be lovely.