Day 12: Omura – Saza

[post of Sunday 19^th of August 2012]

Warm. Up-hill. More warm. More up-hill… and above all, ugly.

Apart from the last 10 km, there is no other way to describe today’s stage. We left Omura slightly later, and without having the rest we wished. It was a pity not to say goodbye to Katelyn, our host in Omura, but we’re sure we’ll meet again somewhere in the world.

Theoretically, today we have a coastal stage. We didn’t see the sea thou, but just the urbanisations typical of coastal regions. In any case, what has definitely left a sign today (quite literally!) is the sun. Also, in theory we’re here in the monsoon season, wind and rain should be hitting hard the Japanese archipelago… instead, the only thing that is really hitting us is the unbearable warm! Of course we had been warned about this, and we also checked the weather forecast for today, but seeing that they all mark 31 degree Celsius, we are now convinced all the thermometers we have encountered must be broken or they plainly lie to us. We just don’t believe this is ‘only’ 31 degrees! To give you an idea of what brought us to this conclusion, let just add that from time to time we have to remember to move the feet because the plastic of our shoes melts and get stuck to the pedals. The km-meter fails at midday; when we buy a chocolate bar, it melts in the 10 meters we have to cross to sit down under the canopy of the little establishment we have chosen to eat in today. Ainhoa, who never ever gets sunburnt, has the arm full of blisters; the rest of the body skin is completely irritated by the sun and the warm. At first, we always wore helmets but the safety of Japanese roads, and the weather, has brought us to leave them in the saddlebags quite often. We decided it was better to face the inclemency of the weather in the Japanese way, with a towel in the forehead. 

 Beside the warm there is the humidity… our clothes never get dry, we sweat even under the shower, and we often feel as if in need of more air to breath. Between midday and 2pm it’s just impossible to get out in the street. But above all, it’s very bad if we are caught in the middle of a section up-hill of our stage during these few afternoon hours! We are drinking an average of 8 litres of water each, sport drink if we manage. We fear more sunstroke than dehydration. Alongside the highway there are public toilets and other establishment to offer rest and water to the passers-by… and we find tap-water not only drinkable but extremely good to taste! These facilities are like a blessing, and they even offer very nice food and an extremely reasonable price. In addition, having air conditioned inside, this kind of establishment is perfect to have a rest from the warm and the sun, and get our body temperature down to a normal level. Having endured all this, we strongly suggest that, if you want to do a journey through Japan like ours, you avoid this period of the year. We had no choice this time; we tried to get Gabriel’s holidays in May but we failed, so here we are. On the contrary from the summer, spring and autumn are definitely better periods to cyclo-travel across Japan.

Thanks God we manage to get through the early afternoon and, by 5pm (more or less like 7pm in Spain), the sun is not that pressing. We even get the impression that the 60 lm we’ve gone through today are not that heavy on our legs! Since we went up quite a lot earlier on, now we have a nice 10 km running down-hill, and outside big cities too. We are in the Saza region now, and the surrounding is gorgeous again. Here we’re gonna meet our host for today, Peaceful, who’s just come back from South-Africa. He cooks for us an Indonesian dish and, after the dinner, introduces us to his friend. Like Peaceful, they are all English teachers; a Canadian, a guy half Japanese and half North-American, a British girl, and a guy from Philippines. Shane, the half-Japanese, brings us to his house and offers a tasting session of Japanese beer and sake. Then he leads us to a bar for surfers nearby, where we see in good display a pretty good-looking jamón serrano from the Alpujarra región in Spain. True, we end up being quite late tonight, and perhaps we dran too much at the end, but the whole night has been great and worth it.