Summer Cycling

When I bought my bicycle, I planned to use it not only for nearby shopping trips but also for traveling. My idea was that I would (someday) cycle around all of Japan with just the luggage on my bicycle and camp in one of the many free or cheap campsites. I've sort-of practiced this three times by packing my bicycle and cycling to a nearby park (20 minutes away), then setting up my hammock and trying to sleep. The first time I came home after half an hour because I decided the location was too remote. The second and third times I only slept for a couple hours before waking up again, and ended up going home as dawn was breaking. So these trial runs were not very encouraging, but they all took place in fairly low temperatures and after just 20 minutes of cycling. Surely if I was tired from cycling and didn't have to worry about the cold wind blowing through the hammock, things would go better, I thought. Well, summer vacation is long and should be a good time to see if my idea was actually possible.

So yesterday I pack up my bike and set out at 8:30. That was my first mistake. The high these days is over 90 degrees, the humidity is at least 70%, and direct sunlight is near unbearable for more than a couple minutes, so ideally the main part of my cycling trip would finish by 11 or 12. I had planned to leave at 7 but that didn't happen, and even that goal was a bit lenient. Anyway, I was headed south to a city called Iida, about 76 km (46 miles) away. There was another city on the way that I told myself I could stop at if I got too tired.

The problem with these distances is that they assume that you take more or less the most direct route. Sometimes this route is okay, but about half an hour into my trip I found myself having to choose between a very narrow sidewalk and a very busy road with no shoulder and many large trucks. This is essentially my worst nightmare as a cyclist (although I happened to pass two other cyclists, also foreigners, going the opposite way on this road. They were packed up just like me, too.) So I got off that road pretty quick and found a parallel one. When that one ended, I took some great roads next to the mountains with decent shoulders and very few cars. They were lovely and had fantastic views, but they took me a bit off-course and were very physically demanding as well.

At Komagane (my back-up city) I decided to press on, and it was shortly afterwards that I decided I was really tired and should have stopped, probably around 55 km. This was my worst mistake, which I don't plan to repeat. Shortly past Komagane, I missed a turn, or more likely, the turn looked like another scary narrow and busy road that I didn't want to go on. Because of this, I ended up making a semi-circle instead of a line to my destination. It was somewhere around this point that I started getting leg cramps which made me stop and take long breaks on shady bits of pavement. I did keep hydrated, but I could tell that I was not feeling good.

I rolled into the parking lot of my destination at 5:00, 7.5 hours after starting my journey. My actual cycling time was 5 hours 45 minutes, and I had gone 95 km at this point. So if I'm staying at a free campground, where do I bathe? At a public bath, my destination, and I was really ready for it. It was my first time at a Japanese bath, and this was a really nice one. First I had to take off my shoes to enter the building and put them in a locker. Next I bought a ticket using a vending machine and gave it to the receptionist. After that I went downstairs to the changing room. I knew that it's expected (or even required) to be completely naked in the baths, but since I was the only one in the room I dallied for a bit hoping to have my ideas confirmed. Then a cleaning lady came into the room and started vacuuming. I was moderately shocked. I couldn't just take off all my clothes in front of a cleaning lady, so ended up taking a bag into the baths and taking off the rest of my clothes there. The cleaning lady later came into the baths, so I guess it would have been fine, but still definitely strange. This place apparently had 7 different types of baths, and for the price I can believe it. I was tempted to try at least one, but considering how utterly exhausted I was, and thinking about how I still needed to set up camp before dark, I decided to settle with a shower.

The campsite I picked out was 2.5 km away, and apparently it had a restaurant very close by. First I went to the restaurant, and as I feared it was closed, so I cycled back to town and bought some convenience store food for dinner. Incidentally, convenience store food sounds gross, but in Japan it's really quite good--everything is fresh. Anyway, I got back to the campsite, set up my hammock, and ate my dinner because I was too hungry to do anything else. When I finished it was dark, but I managed to get my bug net on my hammock and get in. Then I checked the weather--supposedly there would be light rain and thunderstorms. For about half an hour I laid in my hammocking considering how bad it would be if I was rained on, and in the end I managed to convince myself to set up my rain fly. Ugh, I hate setting up my rain fly, and when I finally got it set up, my hammock felt really humid. I had to get up and adjust the hammock a couple more times, but eventually I fell asleep, probably between 3 and 4 AM.

I woke up at 8 because of the heat and quickly packed up. I tried to find the nearby train station and failed because by this point my phone was completely dead. That was scary, but I followed the signs for the main city station and found it without difficulty. There I spent over an hour trying to figure out how to pack up my bicycle. In Japan you can't take bicycles on the train unless they're packed up in a bag, so you have to take the wheels off and secure them to the frame, and you should really take the rack off as well but I didn't have any tools to help me do that so I managed (barely) to get it in my bag without doing so. After a 3 hour train ride, I arrived back in Shiojiri.

It was unquestionably an experience, and I'm glad I did it, but I definitely need to be more careful about exertion in the future. I'm fairly sure that I've never worked physically so hard for so long, and now I'm bone tired and feel almost sick, so I don't really care to think about cycling in the future at the moment.