Day 4: Shibushi – Kagoshima

[post of Monday 13^th of August 2012]

Today it was the very first day of real cycling! I’m sorry for the fanatics of statistics, but we are not in the same club. We don’t care about average speed, calories burnt in the day, the exact duration of the time we’ve spent cycling, or how many times per day Ainhoa fells from the bike (interestingly enough, this keeps happening when she’s stopped). Nevertheless, we’ll take a note of the level of difficulty and the total length in km of today’s route, so we’ll get an idea of how far we’ve gone in the entire day.

When we arrived with the ferry to Shibushi (the name sounds like cat food), the sky has literally felt over us. It was raining so much that we can even say the weather was nice and chilly. We disembarked from the ferry, and we got on our bikes. We got lost, and stopped; got really wet with the rain, and change direction; we discussed the new course of action, we ask ourselves what we were doing there… some minutes of deep thinking… then we relaxed a bit and, finally, got the right direction. We were so worried by the possibility of missing the ATM in Shibushi! …and the rain-like-shower didn’t stop pouring, so it wasn’t a good omen. We got to the main road of the town with low spirit but… few km ahead of us, there it was, the post office… with a gorgeous ATM inside just waiting for us! And today we eat a freshly made meal, horray!

Shibushi is lovely, and it’s difficult to concentrate in the road with so much beauty around us. A Shintoist 

temple on top of a mountain, the typical Japanese cemeteries beside the road, the green of the fields of rice plants, the glorious vegetation, the roofs of the houses, the cicadas singing…

And so on and so forth, our day went on between uphill and downhill. When we arrived to Tarumizu, where we had to take another ferry to Kagoshima, we were struck in daydream by the vapours coming out from the Sakurajima volcano. Indeed, we were even more daydreaming in the ferry, where we had a little nap of a hour which restored all our forces for the remaining journey of the day.

In Kagoshima, our next host is waiting for us. Today we enjoy a nice terrace where to have dinner while looking at the lights of the city, and the mountains encircling it.