GW2023 D4 Biwaichi (nearly)

Route: Around Biwalake from Katata to Karasaki

Bicycle: 161 km

Train: 50 km

Average Speed: 20.9 km/h

Riding Time: 7:42 h 

Total Ascent: 287 m

Weather: Sunny and getting warm, 17 C (on average… but definitely felt a lot warmer around the mid of the day)

After the Yogoko-ichi yesterday with my colleague, today I did attempt the famous Biwa-ichi. The day was nearly perfect for this. No wind, no chance of rain, just a little bit too hot in the early afternoon for my liking. But just about tolerable. 

I got up at 5:30, which sounds worse than it is… seeing that at that time the sun is already out and about and took a train from Kyoto station that arrived shortly before 7:00 at Katata station. As suggested by the rental cycle shop in Maibara yesterday, I just planned on doing the Biwa-ichi from Biwa-o-Hashi instead of the full Biwa-ichi, both to safe a few kilometres and make this attempt actually doable for me and also to safe myself from the relentless and stop and go traffic close to Otsu.

I generally stayed on the cycle path for “slow cyclists”, simply because it is a separate cycle path rather than the need to cycle on the street and need to fight for space with cars and lorries. The surface isn’t totally ideal and some of the bumps do get into your hands and back, but I still prefer that over close passing lorries. 

The first 50 km from Katata to around Maibara passed quickly. I had cycled that area already multiple times in previous rides, and it is a nice cycling area. I had my obligatory stop at the solitary tree on the shore:

Not really sure if one can call this tree SOLITARY… it hardly ever is alone, but always well accompanied by cyclists, motorists and car drivers eager to get a shot of it with their chosen mode of transportation. 

The second 50 km were a lot more tiring and I needed a lot more stops, maybe every 15 km or so… But they were also in the most beautiful part of the Lake Biwa, with a lot of nature, a small street along the shore and small, traditional villages. 

I did enjoy it, and definitely want to come back, maybe just for a ride from Maibara to Takashima, to really enjoy that area at a leisurely pace and maybe with a bit less heat. 

The good thing about riding around Lake Biwa, is that there is a train line on both sides of the lake, so one is never too far away from salvation through JR, if that should become necessary. Very good for long, exhausting rides, to have the option to give up and find a train station in proximity. I think that allows me ultimately to ride further as the safety net is always there. 

Someone wanted to have a golden temple to live in… so painted their garden wall in gold (or so it seemed to me)

I remembered from a ride I had done from Kyoto through Takashima to Ogoto onsen, that the road after Takashima was quite narrow, but either the road works had advanced, or the car traffic was simply much slower than when I was here back in January, today it felt okay. Even got the shot of the solitary (and this one really IS solitary) torii in the water:

But the best picture of the ride, I think I took here, somewhere between Shiga and Horai station:

This picture will definitely make it into this years family calendar. 

All the time I was riding I had in the back of my mind, to eventually try the full Biwa-ichi (if I had enough energy), or to get in my second ever 100 mile (I.e. 160 km) ride completed. The full Biwa-ichi was out of discussion after the very tiring second 50 km… but I thought I could attempt the 160 km… which only were about 12 km more than the full circle from Katata. When I arrived back at Katata station, I made a quick plan of a ride that just added enough km to get up to the 160 km and to a station. And I was even rewarded with a last sightseeing spot along the shore, Karasaki ninja. 

After this long ride I was very much exhausted and had quite a sunburn (not peeling though) on my arms and feet, but still it was a great ride. And specially the most Northern part of the lake warrants more rides. 

On the next day, however I needed a rest day… and found the perfect gardens in/around Kyoto to do so. 

Arashiyama without tourists - 観光客無しの嵐山

Bicycle: 114.3 km

Route: Osaka - Arashiyama and back

Total riding time: 6:37 h 

Total ascent: 299 m 

Average speed: 17.3 km/h

Weather: Some sun, some clouds, no wind to speak of, 13 C

Although since earlier this week there are some restrictions in place in Osaka (among other prefectures), going out to do sport is still perfectly allowed, and I was definitely not alone, although kept to myself. 

After the great experience last weekend in Kyoto and Nara without tourists, I decided to give Kyoto (this time Arashiyama) another try. I had a few other rides also planned more local in Osaka, but will do those some time in the future.

Today's highlight was definitely the Arashiyama bamboo grove without tourists:

Normally nowadays this bamboo grove is just packed with tourists. So much, that it can easily seem that there are more tourists than bamboo around. But not so today. But before I got there... I needed to ride up again the Yodogawa River.

There were definitely less people around than in the last 2 weekends, specially less people doing picnics, but still some groups playing baseball, rugby, tennis or football, which technically is allowed as the web page of the local government exercise is one of the examples of necessary activities for daily lives, as long as done with the smallest number of people attending... so 22 for football... 1 for cycling. Although I have to say, I saw a few cyclists in groups. Mostly it was probably families, but some were clearly riding buddies (unless there is a unknown subculture of polyamorous gay men in Osaka and around).

I came again to the hanami spot at the confluence of Kizugawa, Ujigawa and Katsuragawa where they form Yodogawa and it was clear that mankai 満開 was last week.

Top left: today, top right: 2 weeks ago, bottom: 1 week ago

But still, some nice hanami shots:

As mankai was over, the path leading out into the peninsula was open for cyclists. I didn't need a second invitation and rode it. Probably the first 2 extra km of today.

I continued on on the same river as last weekend, after a while transferring to yet another river, that brought me smack into the center of Arashiyama and over the Togetsu bridge:

Last time I was here was right after a massive typhoon had hit Kansai and destroyed the bridge to Kansai airport (from where I was supposed to leave a few days after the typhoon). As that didn't happen, I decided that weekend to go to Arashiyama (by train), ride around on a rented mamachari and explore the lesser known (and much less touristy areas) of Arashiyama, which was a nice ride, although I got my feet wet on the river banks riding through some puddles that profed deeper than I thought.

Today, the river was well within its shoulders. While riding up the river and getting to the 50 km mark, I was getting hungry. Not too hungry, but well, hungry. So I discussed with me my options but finally decided to make it until Arashiyama, as I remembered that a few years back (maybe 10?) we had a very nice vegetarian lunch in a restaurant in a temple (Tenryuji). The restaurant was still open, just if they had waited for me, one of their few customers of the day, and definitely the only one to make it to their door after 13:15

After lunch I explored the gardens of the temple, which are apparently dating back to the 14th century when this place first was a palace and then became a temple. Today for sure one could admire the garden as it must have been 700 years ago. Quietly sitting on the veranda, gazing out over the pond into the hills where some cherry trees are flowering.

Also across the rest of the garden more trees were flowering, most prominently the rhododendrons.

I would say that today there were more employees around (gardeners working on their knees with tiny knives weeding out invisible weed and guards who had no one to guard or amonish) ....

... than tourists.

Top: handbag in social isolation, bottom: shoes in social isolation

... okay, the shoe picture is slightly tricked. There was one more rack for shoes just behind me, where there were actually 3 other pairs of shoes. So no, I was not totally alone in the temple.

In total, lunch included I spent 2 hours at this temple complex, feeding, relaxing, taking pictures. I even paid the extra entrance fee for the Dharma Hall where a dragon on the ceiling will follow each of your steps... and watches carefully that no one takes a picture of it.

So now it was nearly 15:30 and I knew I needed to get moving back, did I want to make it back to Osaka before nightfall (or at least back to the onsen of choice of the day). But I could not leave Arashiyama without a quick peak to the famous bamboo grove. Last time I was here, it was packed with tourists, and I just had a quick peak and no picture. This time tourists were sparse.

Normally this path is no longer ridable with a bicycle due to the masses of tourists walking through. But today even this was possible. I met the guy in this picture a few kilometers later as we were both riding back towards Osaka (only he had 20 km less than me before him), right when we both were trying to take a picture of a shinkansen and hanami:

Shinkansen hiding behind the petals 

The ride back along the rivers was eventless. I stopped for a quick snack at the hanami spot, where there is a rest area for cyclists and then continued down the Yodogawa river, where I noticed this bicycle cemetery that I must have passed already quite often, without ever noticing it properly.

I passed through some more of these terribly annoying roadblocks ...

... before heading "inland" to my choice of onsen of the day, a onsen of the same chain I went to yesterday in Amagasaki. This one however a bit newer. I had a great relax in the different outside pools, including one lie down option on stones with hot water flowing over it, and just made it in time for last order to their restaurant for my solitary dinner.

The plan for Arashiyama was a 108 km ride, which I knew was doable, after the 101 km ride last week to Kiyomizudera. I got up a bit earlier than normal and was out on the road at 9:00 (early for me... late for many others), which gave me the full day ahead. Also I didn't have a heavy sightseeing plan due to Covid-19 but also due to the fact that I needed to ride all the way back, if I didn't want to cheat on the restrictions to only do essential travel. But my timing was perfect arriving at the onsen only shortly after it became dark.

While I road at the beginning of the day I thought, well, 111 km would be a nice number, knowing that there are always a few extra km that one rides by missing a right turn or by just straying off the route. However during my dinner at the onsen, I looked at the date, 11th of April and first thought, oh perfect 111 km on the 11th, is a nice number, until I realized that 114 km on the 11/4 would be even nicer. So that's why I did a few extra loops just below my house - no Strava art :-) 

And oh yes, it was my longest ride ever, by a whole 7 km!

Tomorrow it will rain. So a rest day, and time to write some posts. 

Kyoto without Tourists - 観光客なしの京都

Bicycle: 101.4 km

Route: Osaka to Kyoto and back

Total riding time: 6:14 h 

Total ascent: 317 m 

Average speed: 16.2 km/h

Weather: Sunny, warm but not too hot, up to Kyoto very nice tailwind, 18 C

Very hard to pick the picture of today. Was it Kiyomizudera, just reopened a few weeks ago after extensive restoration in time for the 2020 Olympics? Or was it the torii tunnel at Fushimi Inari Shrine void of tourist masses one of the places that left a most lasting impression on me when I first visited 25 years ago? Or was it my second ever 100 km ride?

Today's ride was courtesy of Covid-19, which cancelled a 2 day ride I had signed up earlier this week on Naoshima with a local Osaka group of cyclists and which made that two of the most popular sightseeing spots in Kyoto, Kiyomizudera and Fushimi Inari were very pleasant without too many tourists. Japan is in a special situation, it banned Chinese tourists very early on, then tourists from other countries were afraid of catching Covid-19 in Japan and started to cancel their trips probably from around mid Feb, early March and at end of March Japan imposed a travel ban on practically all Europeans, Americans, Chinese, Korean... So essentially there are no foreign tourists in Japan. Plus many Japanese, but by far not all, have obeyed and stayed away from too crowded areas, which means, that normally crowded areas aren't crowded at all, and I would say social distancing (about 2 m apart) is doable practically everywhere most of the time. 

So I used all this to ride up to Kyoto. The first part of the ride was a rather uneventful ride up the Yodogawa river, today on the left side of the river with a nice and strong tailwind resulting in a maximum speed of 39.2 km at some point. 

For lunch I stopped at the hanami spot where I passed already last weekend (and last year), and although the weather was much better today than last Sunday, there were still very few visitors, and picnic was officially not allowed. But a few people did very small picnics. 

I unpacked my rice roll and had my lunch under the cherry trees that start shedding their petals. Very romantic. 

After lunch I continued on a new river, which I am pretty sure I have never ridden before and came through an other very nice hanami spot while riding into Kyoto. The only thing about this bicycle lane is that the tarmac isn't very smooth.

I turned away from the river and up a small hill to Kiyomizudera, which was splendid today. Sakura in full bloom, perfect weather and few tourists. Couldn't have been better.

This picture has it all: Hanami, heron, pagoda, pond

Before leaving Kiyomizudera I had a small snack of these very fresh sweet gel-like "noodles", which I like quite a lot. 

And then on over a romantic bridge ...

... and through a neighborhood full of temples to Fushimi Inari. 

Fushimi Inari is definitely my preferred shrine in Japan. When I first visited it 25 years ago the torii tunnel left a deep impression on me. Japan had much less tourists then, and I know that I took some pictures very similar as today, with the tunnel of torii without anyone. Something that in normal times nowadays seems to be completely impossible, as this shrine has got so popular that it is incredibly crowded every day... except now with no tourists around. I went again a few years back (I think 2015) right after New Year and the shrine was incredibly busy with business men making their annual offering. This was also a very nice and unique experience. But I am very happy to have seen it again very empty. 

The one thing I did not know 25 years ago, is that those torii are not purely for decoration. They are offered by companies to the shrine for their success. And actually somewhere in all this forest of torii there is a price list for torii's. 

While the front of each torii only says 納奉, which probably means something like paid offer... 

... the backside of each torii says precisely which company (or individual) paid for the torii ... 

... and when it was erected. 

Down at the shrine itself, there were products of the main patrons of the shrine exhibited. Mostly sake, but it is not limited to this. There was also milk, snacks, chocolate, beer ... 

When we were here at New Years a few years back the shrine looked much more like a supermarket than a shrine with all possible offerings, including kleenex tissues... 

At around 17:00 I left the shrine. Actually quite late, knowing that the way back was still over 40 km and that the wind was against me. But I had a back-up plan. I could hop on a train somewhere along the Yodogawa and get back to Osaka, if I got too tired or it got too late. 

But after struggling a bit against the wind before the Sakura spot on the river confluence, from there onwards down the Yodogawa it was much less windy. Looking at the strava map it seems I went in a quite perfect straight line, so wind should have been strong on Yodogawa as well, but maybe it turned or was channelled by the parallel mountains along the river in some other way. 

I reached the sakura spot shortly before sunset.

Which inevitably means that it got dark along the way down to Osaka as it is still about 30 km from there back to Osaka. But weather was nice and I was making good progress along the river, and I did not need to search for my way (which at night even with garmin isn't that easy as the screen continues to go dark) so I made it back all the way to Osaka and to "my" onsen in Naniwa where I relaxed my tired legs in the hot water and had dinner afterwards. 

At that point I was at 95 km... So now I had the ambition to make it to 100 km today... but it was only about 3 km from there back to my apartment... so after the bath and dinner I took a small detour to see some night sakura along the river.

Right on the bridge over the Yodogawa I then completed my second ever 100 km ride. (the other was last year September in the Netherlands. )

100 km - お疲れ様でした。

GW 2019 - Day 6 Yamatoyagi down to Wakayama 大和八木から和歌山へ

Bicycle: 91 km

Route: Yamatoyagi - Wakayama

Total riding time: 5:38 h

Total ascent: 410 m 

Average speed: 17.2 km/h

Weather: Sunny and warm, but not too warm, 23 C

After the rainy weather yesterday, today, as promised, it was sunny and nicely warm. The right weather for a new record ride from Yamatoyagi to Wakayama, a total of  91 km. 

Luckily the ride is mainly downhill, once a small pass is overcome behind Yamatoyagi, but the way up to that pass is quite gentle, so not a problem. Also the road I took up, was very bicycle friendly, small country side roads, very little traffic, often through villages in idyllic landscape. And always along a train line that makes the same trip (much faster than me on two wheels). 

Close to this Sake factory, there is Gojo station, a small station, with a very formal station master who took about 15 min to sell me the tickets for tomorrows trip from Wakayama through Shin-Osaka, Okayama to Yasugi. Everything needed to be controlled and checked again and again (he was alone, so couldn't ask a QC by a separate person). He obviously also has other duties, so is not specialized on selling tickets. At a ticket counter e.g. in Osaka that same transaction would have probably taken 3 min... But time was no problem and it is all an experience to see these hyper correct employees at their work.

Not too far from there I had my lunch (which I bought at the one and only shop at this station) along a river, which was decorated with rows and rows of fish kites for the boys day:

At about km 30, following the route I had planned on Garmin, I crossed the river, and then a cycling lane appeared. First it was only a blue line on each side of the street without any description. (But I knew that there could be a cycling lane and I knew from Kibi-Plain and Shimanami-Kaido that blue is a likely colour for a cycling route.)

The lane was partially simply on a normal, but not too busy road, but there were also parts on proper cycling lanes along the river. This here was probably the nicest part of all:

On the river part, there were also some obstacles, but nothing like in Osaka, where you need acrobatic skills to ride through them (or just need to get off at each one). 

However, as so often in Japan at some point the cycling lane just disappeared. It first disappeared for me shortly after the Jison-in temple (see below). I found it again, after a while when I decided to cross the river. It must have crossed the river somewhere much closer to the temple. However the joy of finding the cycle lane did not last for very long, it disappeared from the street without any warning. What might have happened to that blue line? Riding on national route 24 was not an option, as there is way too much traffic, but there were always small streets running just parallel through the villages, so no problem at all. After a while there didn't seem to be a good continuation and I started to really wonder where this cycle lane had gone, so I decided to head down to the river in the assumption that the cycle lane would be somewhere down there. And well, it was, I saw traces of it just after crossing the bridge at km 65. But soon after I lost it again. Maybe it crossed the river again? Anyway, I continued on the side of the river where I was and found again small side streets all the way to central Wakayama and my hotel of the night.

As there were so many km to cover, I hadn't planned for any sightseeing, however when passing Jison-in (I actually passed it and then turned back), there were big signs for "Unesco world heritage"... and I could see the temple really close from the street, so I did not give it a miss.

The temple (cum shrine) is a typical temple, nothing special about it, except that it is the starting point of the pilgrimage trail up to Koyasan. It has however a toilet that even for Japanese needs translation and furigana:

I looked up the kanji for "kawaya" 厠 and the only other use of this kanji came up as 厠の神 (Kawaya no kami) the god of the toilet. I guess that in a temple with shrine at the start of a pilgrimage route, there must be gods for everything, including for the toilet.

While I was at the temple, there were a few other visitors, the most notable one a middle aged Japanese who jumped out of a taxi, sprinted up the steep stairs to the shrine, took pictures of everything, and then sprinted dow the stairs again, back into his taxi. Express tourism!

Garmin unfortunately died after about 74 km (well, its battery did). I somehow suspect that either there is a setting that makes it use more battery, or that maybe the battery isn't anymore what it once was, but it is becoming harder and harder to make a full day trip on one battery load. Unfortunately I also forgot my portal battery charger at home... and was too lazy to get a new one while in Japan. But my phone still had enough battery to record the rest of the ride.

While riding into Wakayama I checked if there were onsen somewhere with a rotenburo, but I wasn't able to find anything convincing, so I continue on to the hotel, where I asked and was recommended Hanayama onsen (花山温泉), which I had seen during my search, but discarded. After further searching on the internet I saw that it seemed to be an interesting onsen, and made a quick night ride to it.

And yes, it was interesting. It only has one small rotenburo pool, but inside there were 6 different pools, 3 of them with the signature waters of this onsen, which are extremely high in mineral content, and 3 with normal tab water. Out of the onsen pools, they had 3 different temperatures, 41 C, 37 C and 26 C! 26 C is a very unique temperature for an onsen. Too cold to be a "real" onsen, but too warm to be a cool downer after sauna. And actually also too cool for me to immerse myself completely. 

Part 1 from Yamatoyagi down to close to Wakayama where Garmin's battery died:

Part 2, the final kilometers into Wakayama, recorded directly on the iPhone Strava app: 

Evening ride to Hanayama onsen: