Day 2: Sakai

[post of Thursday 9^th of August 2012]

Perhaps the hardest stage of our trip… we went through it without even touching our bikes. After 9 hours of plane (or where there 11? We are not sure, we got a bit messed up with the time change!), we arrived to the airport of Kansai (Osaka) at 5pm local time. Then the odyssey began. The goal of our mission: to get to Nozomi’s house, the first of our hosts for our first night in Japan.

We went to get our luggage and bikes, which looked quite alright at first sight (then we had to face some surprise about this). We went through the immigration office and, after a fair amount of questions and answers, forms and bows, we officially arrived in Japan. The weather was very nice, not as hot as we had feared, and there were very few clouds in the sky. We had a bit of a crisis getting the train tickets and pulling the boxes with the bikes around and up to the platform. We had to change in Mikunigaoka, where there are the famous burials in the shape of a horseshoe, and get to the station of Hagiharatenjin. Luckily, there was a lift and a kind Japanese guy who helped Ainhoa with her box/bike. The lighter of the two boxes/bikes we carried with us was 29 kg. the bikes had to been kept packed for the journey in the train, so there was no way we could get rid of the boxes to have less weight to carry around. At the end, we spend some two hours just pulling boxes between platforms and trains, plus more pulling and sumimasens (Japanese for apologising).

When we finally got to our destination, Hagiharatenjin station, we called our host Nozomi, who had also a Polish couple in her house (although they were at the very end of the same tour of Japan we were just beginning). The polish guy of the couple came to get us at the station, and got really shocked when he saw our boxes with the bikes in them. We couldn’t bring them like packed to Nozomi’s house so we proceeded, in the darkness and in haste, to unpack them. There and then we realised that one of the screws in Gabriel’s bike was a bit bended (let’s just hope it’ll last until the end of our trip!), and Ainhoa’s kickstand had suffered some minor damage, but nothing to worry too much about. We were almost at the end of the day, and some delicious Takuyaki (fried or grilled octopus in a ball-shape) were waiting for us in Nozomi’s house. They had been cooked in an electrical waffle-iron that looked very cute to us. After a well-deserved hot shower, we finally went to bed, where Ainhoa couldn’t sleep the entire night because of her allergy to cats, which she-s never fully accepted because she like cats very much.