Cycling the length of Japan
Marie and I spent 3 months in Japan this summer. It’s hard to summarise such a long trip in such an interesting country, but here goes an attempt.
Planning the trip started more than a year before. Originally we wanted to cycle the US Tour Divide (Mexican border to Banff Canada) northbound to meet all the racer racing south, and cheer them on their way to the finish. American politics and the more mountain-bikey nature of the route were parts of the reasons why we settled on a different destination. We landed on Japan because we read it’s a great cycle destination, it has a culture that we knew much less about than American culture and the road surfaces seemed more suited to our current bicycles. We put money aside for more than a year, and started planning. One of the biggest questions we had, was whether to start in the north and cycle south, or the other way around; starting north we would potentially spend less time crossing the rainy season that starts in june and moves northward the next month but we could face cold and snowy conditions in Hokkaido in May, and extreme warm weather in the south in August. We took a chance about the rainy season, and settled for the northbound journey just a month before leaving. We flew to Tokyo, and took another plane to Kagoshima, the biggest city in the southern island of Kyushu.
I’ll write more about the trip later, here are some of my favorite pictures.
