Japan by bike in 2019

Prologue

Firstly, I’ll work through the obvious questions....

Why Japan? It is a wealthy country with an Asian culture. It is full of surprises and doesn’t disappoint. In recent years, it has become much more affordable.

Have you been to Japan before? Yes, hitch-hiking on a tight budget and that was a fabulous experience (Japan in 1986 on 8 USD/day). More recently, we passed through Japan with a half day to wander around the city of Narita, we saw that it was as crazy as ever and we should come back for another visit.

Why Kyushu? It’s the Southern most of the major islands, I had heard/read good things about it and it doesn’t seem to get the visitors like Honshu. A number of blogs indicated that it should be good cycling.

So, the idea spawned to ride Kyushu. I looked a number of flight options and an open jaw air ticket would allow us to fly to the far south and work our way to Hiroshima, to have a look at the intriguing west coast of Shikoku and to ride the popular Shimanami Kaido (the bridges linking Shikoku and Honshu).

Route Planning: Amakusa Islands, Mt Aso, Kurakawa Onsen, Kunisaki Peninsula , Western Shikoku, Shimanamani all looked interesting so I put a general connecting route together, then realized that we wouldn’t have quite enough time for Mt Aso, so I dropped it from the itinerary.

We have done a Japan free-camping trip, so this was going to be the accommodation trip with a mix of traditional inns (Ryokans), guest houses and hotels. The objective was not to save money but to get more of a cultural experience. Google Maps, Japan doesn’t consider elevation so I went with gpsmyride, only because it seemed to have a lot of Japanese users. Komoot is another growing app that seems to use the same map base (OSM).

With an eye to keep daily distances to around 60km/day without excessive climbing, and using a combination of booking apps (mostly booking.com), I put together a day by day route for a 3 week trip. We were to finish up in “Golden Week” (one of the busiest weeks of the year), so I scrambled to find accommodation for that section, then booked beds for our first week, and well, I may as well book the middle week too. I was glad to have developed the route beforehand, rather than do it each night of the tour.

Language: I also used some audio lessons to learn a few words of Japanese, though I didn’t put too much effort into it. Fast forward into the trip and it didn’t take very long to realize that you can easily get by with very little Japanese. So rather than improve my language skills, I coasted through it.