Day 20: Yamaguchi – Suooshima

[post of Monday 27^th of August 2012]

It’s hard to, but we have to say goodbye to Josh and his wonderful family. Josh accompanies us for the first kilometres of today’s stage. He shows us the right direction, and we head on through some nice and easy 20 km on the bike-way of the road, just alongside the river… or at least we should have done so in theory. Instead we get lost for a little while and we need some time to find out the right direction again.

We have few pictures to upload to the blog today. We’ve got no time for tourism because this is the longest stage of the whole route, of more than 100 km.

We feel the typhoon that is over Okinawa, and the intense wind we feel on our faces does not allow us to keep going on. The wind is so strong that we get up to 12 km per hour in one of the down-hills! The forecast says that the typhoon would pass through Kyushu tomorrow and, then, it’ll move to Korea. The “kamis” [Japanese for “gods”] must be on our side for now ‘cause we’re lucky that the typhoon is heading somewhere else.

Past 99 km of today’s stage, Hikaru meets us at the bridge that joins the great island of Honshu to the gorgeous island of Suooshima. We go up and down through a road without traffic, alongside the coast, one that reminds us of the time spent in the South of Kyushu. So far what we’ve seen of Honshu is heavily affected by the work of the human being. It’s like the Japanese managed to tame this island.

Hikaru’s family is waiting us for dinner. By then, the km-meter accounts for 115 km. the dinner is really delicious. Everything, even the rise, has been grown up in the lands of Hikaru’s family. We’ve never tasted such wonderful rice! In particular, we enjoy the chat with Hikaru’s mother, with the help of Hikaru as the interpreter.

Gabriel gets really scared when he sees the biggest spider in the world in our room. It was something like 20 cm size, and we could even clearly hear when ‘it’ walked on the wall. Hikaru and Ainhoa try to convince Gabriel that it’s good to have a spider in the room because it eats up flies, but he’s not very convinced. In any case, we need some rest after the long day.