Sapporo, Maizuru, Okayama

The journey to Sapporo was a little bit uneventful. It mostly consisted of cycling, drinking sports drinks and getting angry at other traffic and Japanese construction engineers for building roads all the time and having to fix them every few years. How about it, wouldn't it actually be easier to build roads which can last usage, so they wouldn't have to be repaired all the time? I guess the engineers here have a different mindset, for the road was full of all kinds of construction, from new bridges to minor surface repair work.

Otherwise, the sceneries were so familiar from previous trips around Kitami that I rather not mention them. It was not until I was in downtown Sapporo that I actually felt like being in a different city. There was constant urbanization for a good part of the road though, at least farms and whatnot, which is something isn't taken for granted in the areas around Kitami.

Close to Sapporo, there was one event worth mentioning. In Ebetsu, I stopped to eat lunch at a bento place but after getting out of there, it started to rain so much I only got across the street and had to take cover at a Lawson convinience store. There was also a young Japanese guy taking shelter in the same place, so after noticing that the rain developed into a thunderstorm, we started to talk to each other. Ryohei was a 17-year old high school student and of all things, he wanted to be a rock star when he grew up, playing guitar in a punk bank. Why not? It's as good of a profession as any. He could practice his English
and I did my best for Japanese and although the conversation got a bit difficult at times, we could understand each other.


In Sapporo, I was supposed to go sleeping in a capsule hotel. It was most likely the cheapest option still in the downtown area. There were rider houses some 20 km from the city centre, which was too far to really take a look at the city with any ease. So I settled on the same capsule hotel with some other caucasian guy and a bunch of dirty, stinky and butt-ugly Japanese businessmen, whose reason to be there was probably because they couldn't afford anything else after spending their money on hostesses of Sapporo.

Susukino area, in the nexus of which the Capsule inn resides, is famous for just that - hostesses. There's the male alternative too, for women, but both have one thing in common. That is, they both cater for the rich and the emotionally damaged - one night with a hostess serving you drinks can cost tens of thousands of yen if you really have at it and most of the bars of this type are off-limits from gaijin as well. In the evening, the streets start to fill up with the hosts with their almost feminine complexion and dyed, spiky haircuts and some well-dressed businessmen of typical appearance showing up menus of hostess girls to choose from. They're a strictly an affair of no physical contact other than holding hands and the like - it doesn't get deeper than that.

For a great documentary about the host and hostess culture, watch this movie: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6186147595582048109 . It's both funny and somehow sad at the same time, although it's pretty much needless to feel any pity for the hosts, though, being on top of the food chain. It's their customers which make up for the sad parts.

So, back to what I was doing in Sapporo - the first evening wasn't all that interesting, since I was dead tired and just wanted to go to an internet cafe to chat with Tomomi, and I wasn't going to take a look at the nightlife anyway. But later, I met the other tourist in the capsule hotel whose capsule happened to be in the same floor with me so we talked for a good while and thought of seeing each other on the following day. The guy was a German exchange student called Juljan from Tokyo and was much more into the Japanese culture and language than I'm ever going to be.

The next day, it rained a lot. Yeah, it had been raining the day before as well and in fact, every day I had been on this trip so far, it had rained at least a little bit. So why should have Sapporo have been any different? In any case, I spent a good part of the day just reading a book in Starbucks and drinking coffee while it rained, cycled around the city looking around when it didn't, visited the botanical gardens and took a look at a department store just since there wasn't much else to do. Since it was so cloudy, I didn't bother to pay to visit the JR tower from which there's supposed to be a great view of Sapporo. I'm sure there will be chances to see that view later in a better weather.

I also moved my ferry ticket, which had been ordered to me by the only English-speaking staff member of KIT's International center, to leave on 9th. So after two nights in Sapporo, my time was up and I had a mere 35km trip ahead of me to Otaru, a port city next to Sapporo. But since Juljan told me there wasn't a lot to see there, I thought I should just leave later and spent the day with Juljan instead, visiting the Sapporo beer gardens. After all, perhaps Sapporo is more famous as a beer brand than it is as a city.

Back to the ferry tickets though. I used Shin-nihonkai ferry company, for which the ticket cost around 12000 yen a second-class cabin, which in Japan means a room shared with nine other people. Then, there was a cost of 2900 yen for taking my cycle inside. I was put to go together with the bikers as the last in the line and got out of the ship last as well. Unlike I had read from cycling websites, it was in fact impossible to take my cycle with me to the ferry by putting it on a bike bag. In the ferry terminal prior to receiving the ticket, you have to fill out a form, but luckily, this is explained in English, so it's not a problem for someone who doesn't understand a lot of Japanese. On the ship itself, all of the directions were written in English, although the staff didn't seem to speak that language.

The food on the ferry is really expensive due to the fact that there's only one shop inside it, one real restaurant and a kind of cafeteria. It really doesn't compare with the luxury of Finnish ferries for instance, especially with the kind of prices they have. Taking your own food with you is a far better choice than buying something from the ship. Just pack some bentos and instant ramen and it's a whole lot cheaper.

Also, why am I writing
this? Because there's not a lot of information about cycling in Japan on the internet in English, although a few sites exist, so I just want to do it in case someone googles for the information. Most of all, this information would have been useful for me, had it existed, so perhaps it will help someone else too.
so, after getting to Otaru, it was already so late and rainy that there was not much of a sunset to be seen, just a quick bath, a all-you-can-eat dinner and the it was off to the waiting line.

When I got up to the ship, the second-class cabins were listed with letters from A to something like K or P or whatever and it was apparently okay to go anywhere you liked. I didn't know this though, but there was a biker who'd helped me out before in the line and I bumped into him on the hallway again. He'd been touring Hokkaido for three days of his five-day summer vacation and spent two days on the ship. After he helped me out, we talked some more and sort of celebrated my 23rd birthday, but since everything on the ship was actually closed, it was kind of difficult, and I was in kind of murky mood anyway since the people I really wanted to celebrate with were somewhere far away.

So, on the next day, we finally arrived to Maizuru, the port in Kyoto prefecture that we were headed to. We separated our ways with Jinno, the 28-year old biker, black belt of judo and a police officer. I headed for the capsule hotel, he headed for Osaka, a two-hour ride from Maizuru with his bike.

I didn't even have a map of the Kansai area, but as for Maizuru, I got it from the ship's reception, but I found my way to the railway station without it as well. I asked the clerk for a map of Himeji, which would be my next destination, and he was really surprised that I was going there by bicycle. He didn't have a map though, so he drew me one instead. It turned out to be enough for me, so I still don't have any kind of map of the area. I headed for the capsule hotel next, opposite to the station, but since the cheapest form of stay was a rest until 2am, giving me less than five hours of time to sleep, and the more expensive one wouldn't have been so useful since I would be leaving in early morning, I chose the 2am wakeup instead without a capsule. I slept on a reclining, rather comfortable chair for those hours and went off in total darkness. It was an experience by itself though.

I was far away from my apartment, the island I'd been living for the past four and a half months, without a map and without... lights on my bicycle. So I stopped by to eat early breakfast at a convinience store, looked at the road maps and cycled until there were no more street lights. I had to stop for about an hour to a parking lot of an onsen to wait for the sunrise and I just stretched and watched the eastern sky slowly light up. When I could see forward again, I went cycling forward. Then, the sun came up from between the mountains, but it was then I noticed that my camera was full of pictures. I made a stop on a resting area on the side of the road to move my pictures on the laptop and behind the bushes, there was a tent put up with a guy just getting out of there. Of all things, he too was a foreigner and had a cycle with him. I was really surprised to meet anyone on that spot at 6 a.m., but after meeting Caius, we cycled together until the road separated our routes. He went up to the north coast while I headed south for Himeji.

I remember how the Maizuru station clerk said how it's much more than just a hundred to Himeji. So, it indeed turned out to be much more. It totaled around 150 km, cycling on a completely clear day, with no clouds anywhere. But what kind of day it was - after cycling for so long in Hokkaido, everything seemed new again. The houses were made of Japanese wood and with that beautiful, traditional architecture you only see in pictures. Each of them looked like a small temple to me. Then, rice paddies separated the housing blocks from each other and a river flowing through each of the valleys divided the whole landscape apart up until the hills and mountains on the horizon. When I cycled through these areas, I could smell the scent of the wood of which the houses were built upon, see the reflections of same scenery on still lakes and rivers and just enjoy the beauty all around me. Eventually, everything got more urban as I got closed to Himeji, but there, the massive Himeji castle lay in the center of the city with its towers, parks and moots surrounding it.

I won't go explaining the Himeji castle in great detail, as I'm sure it's already been explained in various sources. But it was indeed one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in Japan and easily the most beautiful I've seen on this trip. I could've easily imagined staying a whole day in the castle area just walking around, reading a book in cover of the trees and watching the city from the castle grounds high up on the hill it's built on. But I didn't do any of that, although I did spend a good amount of time on the castle area. Instead, I decided to head for Okayama by train, since it was now really close by, just under a hundred, the train was not that expensive and I had burned myself quite badly after being in the sun all day. Most importantly, though, I wanted to see Tomomi again, which was the reason I was headed for Okayama anyway. So, I packed my cycle on a bag and off I went to the train. Although I was late from the one I was supposed to go, there were other ones coming and I took one of those instead.

So, in total, I have cycled some 490km on this trip so far. Not that much, but the point is not to cover a great distance, rather than to get where I was supposed to go. Besides, I will have enough chances to cycle a lot more later on, too.