Day 31: Biwa Lake – Kyoto

[post of Monday 10^th of September 2012]

We wake up surrounded by early-morning fishermen who have not enough space in the lake (with its some 100 km of coasts) to enjoy their hobby and have to sit down just beside our tent.

In any case, we’re happy we’re up so early and start up planning today’s stage. Initially, we planned to go around the lake but the first kilometres are not that nice in terms of sightseeing as we had expected, so we decided to head off to Kyoto through the longest route, so we can have a look at the mountains. On the way, we find a botanic garden dedicated to water plants. It’s so nice that we get late into the morning before we leave.

We eat something for lunch at a “konbimi” [trans. convenience shop] and we’re ready to climb the mountain with our bikes. The view is so nice that we nearly forget the difficulty of cycling up-hill such a harsh section of the stage. The last kilometres have a difference of level that goes from 7 to 9%. The good thing in these cases it’s that, after the up-hill part, there is always a down-hill one, so we simply let the bikes run down through the last 30 km down-hill before Kyoto.

Probably we should have done a stop somewhere along the way to plan our stay in Kyoto, but we had no idea where we would go until this morning… so we cross Kyoto City to get to the youth hostel that is on our map but, after a hour going around, we are told that that hostel has shut down ages ago. We cycle some more km to the next hotel signalled in the map, but this one too is no longer open. We start to get a bit worry about tonight, we get to check hotels randomly but they are too expensive. Then, we get into a narrow street where we find by chance an affordable hotel, and we decide to stay here for the next two days. As we settle down in our room, we see from the window that it has started pouring raining again.