Day 3: In the ferry

[post of Saturday 11th of August 2012]

We woke up at 6am. We had a relaxing day ahead of us. The only thing we had to do was getting ready to cycle until the port of Nanko and get the ferry to Shibushi. It was in Shibushi where we really began our tour cycling through the Japanese roads.

We took everything easy; we had breakfast with Nozomi; we talked about cats, and more cats, and we hit the road. The sky looked a bit stormy now, so we didn’t bother to get our sun screen ready at hand. Big mistake. Ainhoa is now over-tanned (you can see it very clearly midway through the forehead, where the bandana ends), and Gabriel got a curious red-orange colour too. We did some shopping for the first time in Japan trying to hide our surprise before the spectacular way these people have to wrap up packets and other goods. We then went to a gorgeous park to have lunch, and we were ready to head to the port. After some round-about getting lost and going backward to find the right route, we went through our first language challenge. Once in the port, we went, happy and confident, to the ticket office, where we thought we would easily change our reservation for the ferry tickets. Who says these kinds of things are easy in Japan? It’s true, after a while we managed to understand what we had to do to get our tickets and embark into the ferry, but the price was higher than the one we had expected because of the extra charge for travelling with the bikes.

At the end, we were left with 10 euros to survive up to next day, when we had to get another ferry. The problem was that we needed an ATM to withdraw more cash, but ATMs in Japan are open only from Monday to Friday and, in those condition, we had to keep on float with those 10 euros for dinner today, plus breakfast and lunch the nest day… ah, beside having to cycle through 20 km more! And that was what we were thinking about while embarking on the ferry at Nanko.

We left our luggage in a small room Japanese style, which we had to share with more people, and we went up on deck to see the ferry set sail. Getting on board, we saw some coloured stripes, which are used by the children when the ferry sets sail. They throw the stripes from the deck, tiding them to the boat railing, and it’s a great spectacle to see all the colours and the happy faces of these children, and their parents.

Once we were on our way to Shibushi, we felt one of these feelings everyone notices about Japanese people, high-tech toilets! The water is not very impressive thou. What we really found impressive was the deodorant built-in in private houses. When you flush the toilet, instead of going straight to the deposit of dirty water, the water goes through the tap so you can wash you hands before the same water is used to clean away the debris in the toilet.

We had a nice night of sleep. We slept nearly through the whole journey and, when we woke up in the morning, we took the adventurous decision to buy some dehydrated food prepared in small pots. The only thing we had to do to “prepare” our delicious soup with noodles, meat and prawn, was to add some boiling water. 

Would we find an ATM the next day?