Day 30: Nara – Biwa Lake

[post of Saturday 8^th of September 2012]

We accept the fact that we won’t find Gabriel’s glasses. After all, it’s only money and there are few days left of the trip. If we look at the whole month (and the more than 1,600 km we went through) overall, and the worst thing that happened us was to lose Gabriel’s glasses, well, we’ve been quite lucky. No big problems to the wheels, no harsh falling down from the bikes, no broken up radio, no major muscular injury… yesterday we saw that the Polish couple we meet the first night at Sakai, the same people who have spent the last three years cycling around the world, got their bikes stolen in China. So there we go again, it could be far worse than losing some glasses!

So we have breakfast, pack our stuff, and off we go again. Today’s plan is to get over the urban landscape we’ve been going through in the last days, leave at one side the roads with too much traffic, and to take an alternative route through the mountains to get to Biwa Lake which, more than a lake, is an interior sea with salt-free water.

To get to the huge amount of water enclosed in the mountain, we have to go up-hill through quite difficult sections of the valley. Gabriel is getting tired but, fortunately, Ainhoa has brought some Panini with Jamón Serrano [note: typical Spanish prosciutto]… and for the first time in the trip, it is Ainhoa who’s leading the troupe. She’s got the heaviest luggage and has to wait for Gabriel at the top of the hills. The landscape is, again, beautiful. We go up until the lake and we go around an island for nearly a half an hour until we get to the camping. Like other times, it’s closed, but this time is locked and chained. We look for a quite place outside the camping and around the lake, and we lay down the tent. We chose a lovely spot alongside the lake coast and under the harms of a sequoia that gives us shelter against the pouring rain.

After dinner, we have one of the more amazing experiences of the entire trip. We walk to a shopping centre nearby and get into a gift shop. The inside is simply unbelievable: unicorn underwear, toilet brush with microphone, ice trays to make ice cubes in the shape of Alien, a massage machine for the nose, an action image of Albert Einstein, a vinyl with the soundtracks of the most popular videogames… and much more!