Bicycle: 72 km
Average speed: 14,5 km/h
Total elevation: 834 m
Weather: Sunny, 23C
I had made four different plans for this year’s Golden Week:
- Yamaguchi and Northern Kyushu
- Toogatta onsen, Urabandai and Nikko
- Kusatsu onsen, Shiga kogen and Nozawa onsen
- Eastern Shikoku and Awaijima
The original plan was the Yamaguchi plan, but I also planed the other ones in case the weather wasn’t good. I really liked the idea about the Nagano prefecture ride because it would have allowed me to only take local trains from Tokyo to Takasaki instead of taking a Shinkansen. But that ride would have been a lot more challenging due to much more elevation than in Yamaguchi/Kyushu.
When I checked the weather forecast a few days ago, on the last day, I could still cancel all the hotels for free, the Yamaguchi area seemed to be quite good from a weather perspective plus there’s a lot less elevation going on here, which is a good thing with the added weight from the baggage and my lingering cold which I contracted in early April.
My mother had come to Hagi back in 1995 when she visited me as a student and then travelled for a week through Japan with a JR pass. To this day she is raving about Hagi, what a nice, traditional city it is. I had wanted to come to Hagi ever since, but it is pretty out of the way. In order to get to Hagi one has to cross from the pacific site to the sea of Japan site. Yesterday I took the Shinkansen around noon from Tokyo to Shin Yamaguchi. There were much less crowds at Tokyo Station compared to last year’s Golden Week when I started a few days later.
While sitting in the train, I looked at tourist guide sites to see if there was something to do between Yamaguchi and Hagi. And there was: Akiyoshidai!
A landscape with a unique feature with those big limestones and no rivers , because the water just seeps through the ground directly into the ground water.
All this water flowing into the earth created some huge caves. One can visit one of them for a few kilometers.:
While I was in the cave there were several bus tours with foreigners as well. But not too many. One could definitely enjoy the cave with this number of visitors. Afterwards, I had a very light lunch in the old style shopping street that leads to the entrance of the cave. Then it was uphill, very steep, to an observation point over the undulating terrain with the limestones.
The way from Yamaguchi to the cave had a dedicated bicycle lane which was a very pleasant surprise. It was mainly along the road either on a side walk or and old street.
After Akiyoshidai I was pleasantly surprised by an other road: State road #490. In my planning, I normally always exclude state roads assuming that they will be the most busy roads in the area. Today, thanks to a sign to a pond with Japanese lilies, which did not bloom, I found that this state road has hardly any traffic at all. In fact it has some advisory boards telling drivers to turn back and take the prefectural road instead. So for the next 10 km or so I had this entire road to myself. Just a few workers that were expanding the road but only for a few hundred meters before it turned back into its small rindo (forestry road) style.
I was down in Hagi probably around 4 o’clock and as I had time before the onsen of today would open, I went to the remains of the castle and had some onigiri that I had brought along all the way from the Pacific side.
My guest house in Hagi is above a motorcycle repair shop, quite basic, but also quite new. I had seen on google map and on pictures in tourism brochures about the city, an onsen with quite nice views into nature and quite close to my guest house. So there I went for a restorative and cleaning bath. Obviously no pictures inside the onsen were allowed so this is a picture of the approach.
The onsen itself had 4 rotenburos all with relaxing views and one large inner pool. The rotenburos seemed to be all at the same temperature except one that was much colder (for cooling down after the sauna) .
