[post of
Tuesday 11th of September 2012]
…and we’re
getting to final part of our trip. We have to take the most important decision
of the day: on one hand, there is the plain road, through the city and full of
traffic, of some 75 km; on the other hand, there is the mountain route, 400
metres up-hill, through a road with less traffic and, surely, a much nicer
view, but with 10 km on top of the 75 km of the plain route. We chose the
easier option. Wrong choice. We should have left Japanese roads for good, and
after a fine stage. We should have sweated up going up-hill through a green
valley, and not because we have to wait in front of the many traffic lights of
the city, or avoiding kamikaze bicycles.
Today is a
tough day. We’re tired for the trip and, even thou we’re still on time with the
original planning of a month ago, we begin looking back at this whole adventure
and evaluate it… and of course, we start thinking in the next trip too. This
time we made mistakes we don’t want to repeat in the future. First of all, we
plan too long stages. It would have been far better to have stages of max 50 km
per day… of better said, to dedicate the morning to peddling, and leave the
afternoon to recover, go around sightseeing, relax, and talk more to each
other. Also the type of trip we planned wasn’t great. We decided to have a
linear route, through programmed stops, and planned visits… too much planned.
We had to stick to the original timetable, and we were often overstressed by
the need to get ‘on-time’ to the next stage, or to finish it up before the
night.
The
bicycles have been another source of problems. We’re doing a trip of nearly
2,000 km with two 250€ bicycles, and it’s impossible to forget that. Although
we fixed it properly, Gabriel’s bike has continued to make strange noises and,
most probably, we’ll have to replace the chain and the wheel core… or to buy
another bicycle straight away. The warmth and the humidity have heavily
affected the bikes; cables and hooks are rusty, and three of our deposits are
gone. They lasted long enough, poor them. Now, after three cyclotourism trips,
we know well what we need and what we don’t. For the future, we’ll leave our
mountain bikes for the best things we can do with them, nice short promenades
in the mountains.
It’s
another thing to decide which one, of the three cyclo-trips, has been the best
one. Probably Japan: the safety of its roads, the respect for the cyclist, the
security, the fact that we didn’t have to chain the bikes every single time we
parked them, the delicious food, the express hot food we have found at every
single “kombini” alongside the road, the landscape, the people… the more risky
of the trip has been the natural environment (because of which we plan some
extra days, jus in case), the heavy rain, the typhoons, the several volcano,
the tsunamis, the earthquakes, the
floods… although we always felt protected by the kamis.
With all
this in our mind, we finally get to Kobe, where Kaccey and Bernardo wait for
us. They will welcome us in their house for the days left before we leave… and,
as we get to meet them, they take charge of the task of cheering us up, and
bring us to cook at Okonomiyaki.
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