Day 33: Kyoto – Kobe

[post of Tuesday 11^th 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.