Holiday

I had made somewhat accurate plans for the first few days of my vacation, while I would still be in Hokkaido, so that I could spare my time between cycling and doing something else. I was supposed to cycle a maximum of 130 km per day, which was from Asahikawa to Sapporo and sleep in rider houses, a form of almost-free accommodation for bikers and cyclists alike. In Sounkyo, I was supposed to sleep in a mountain hut and climb up on the mountain in the process. I made these kinds of basic plans for each day but thanks to the weather, I had to change them.

I went off cycling around 6 am and Petri was awake again since he'd been up playing games all night. We saw each other in the hallway and he came to see me off, and off I went after perhaps fifteen minutes of trying to put stuff on my cycle.

I could go no further than two kilometers when one of my panniers suddenly fell off the bike after a slight bump. It came off because a support strap came off its seams. I thought of giving up, going back to the dorm and getting it fixed later that day, but instead, I just wrapped the thing on my bike with kind of hooked, flexible bicycle ropes that you use to attach stuff to back of the bike. It wasn't all that solid but held together well enough, so that I could cycle all the way to Sounkyo.

Last time when I had gotten to Sounkyo, I was in such a hurting on my knee(s) that I couldn't consider cycling after that. Now, although I had to go through the same 1km-high peak, it didn't seem like a problem. I had weighed out my problems last time and fixed my bike's saddle post to proper length and this time, I also ate well before going to the uphill battle, so I didn't get so increbibly exhausted.

In Sounkyo, I spent some time resting and saw that going up on the mountain was pretty much useless - it was so cloudy I coudn't see the peak of Kurodake, the mountain Sounkyo is under. So I called Matias to find out about a nearby city called Kamikawa. I thought I could cycle some more, since I didn't feel so tired and I had lots of time on my hands. There was nothing to see in Sounkyo if the mountains were hidden, so I wanted to go to the next city. Matias found out that there was a rider house, or a camping ground or something you could stay in Kamikawa, so I got going.

When cycling to Kamikawa, it was a completely new road for me. The sights were beautiful while I was in the Sounkyo gorge, but what made it even better was that after a while, the sky cleared up and it seemed like a different world. After tens of kilometers of mountains, there were beautiful farmlands again... and a smell of poo in my nose.

There was nothing in Kamikawa. Just another tiny village with nothing special. I was feeling good, so I skipped it and continued to make my way to Asahikawa, in which I was actually planning to stay as well. I had asked in Sounkyo tourist information for accommodation in Asahikawa and got a name and an address of a guest house somewhere in the city, so I was kind of safe regarding where to stay.

The beautiful day became even better when there was a signpost directed to a cycling road headed for Asahikawa. It went on for 35 km at the end of the trip and made the trip all the more pleasant. The bad thing was that on the cycling road, there was not another soul to be seen. Just locusts, which inhabited all the spots on the road next to some fields. The jumped on my bike and on my shoes too, but I got rid of them soon enough.

All in all, the cycling part ended in Asahikawa after some 175 km when I arrived at my guest house. And to my surprise, my knees weren't even hurting at all. Even my leg muscles were pretty much okay, so I was really, really surprised since the longest distance I'd travelled so far was around 130km and that was by accident (as mentioned before). Now, though, with planning, everything seemed to go really well with regard to cycling. Although I drunk a lot, though, I still really underdid it, because the lack of salts made me fatigued for a part of the next day too.

The next day, I had a clear plan of what to do - go to the Asahiyama zoo, most famous of all animal prisons in Japan and fix my bike bags. I was also headed for a cleaning shop since my cycling outfit had to be washed and I was too lazy to do it by hand myself. So in the morning, I woke up and started cycling to the zoo. In the city, though, I saw another touring cyclist for the first time. A Japanese guy called Kenji was headed for Wakkanai, the northernmost tip in Hokkaido. We exchanged cell phone numbers, he showed me around to the cleaner's and went to a ramen restaurant. Then he went off, although it was raining like hell. Unlike me, though, he was actually equipped to cycle in a hard rain as well.

The zoo was such a disappointment that I don't really know why it's so famous. There were hordes of people and their kids, who were screaming and running around. If anything, the animals looked scared and most of them were sleeping. They were in somewhat small cages, especially the big ones, considering their size. After seeing Singapore zoo last year, I think I'm somehow spoiled, because the animals there have huge amounts of space as far as it comes to zoos, so here in Asahiyama, the sight of the poor animals was not at all impressive.

I don't know much else about Asahikawa thought, since I had to go sleeping early anyhow - I woke up at five or so and the road to Sapporo was 130km long, so it was going to take all day again.