)
I woke up to a beautiful morning in my tent outside the Shari "rider house"
around 6:30 but I wasn't packed up and ready to leave until 7:30. A
few others got an earlier start but I was on the earlier side. The
two girls I had talked to the previous evening were by their motorcycles
getting ready to leave. They kindly posed for a picture for
me. Both girls were diminutive in stature and were riding bikes
bigger than mine! But my little 250cc Spada had served me well and I
had no complaints. Still, at that moment, I wished a had a bigger,
more "manly" machine on which to wave goodbye.
I returned to Route 244, the coastal rode along the Sea
of Okhotsk. )
In
short order,
this became Route 334 and took me northeast into the Shiretoko
Peninsula. The morning light gave the horizon a soft pastel
look. The ocean beside me was clear and an almost tropical-looking
emerald in color. I didn't check but I'm sure the water temperature
was a lot closer to that of Lake Michigan than that of the tropics.
The road here was practically brand new with very little traffic and with
enough curves to make riding on it a true pleasure.
Several kilometers later was a sign for Oshinkoshin
Falls so I stopped to see what it was. There turned out to be a nice
little waterfall just a short hike up a few flights of stone steps. )
Just
as I was about to go back down, up the steps came a girl dressed in
pink. The girl turned out to be a woman who was clearly over
forty. There was nothing wrong with that but she was wearing a
fluffy little girls dress which was little girl pink; her outfit was
topped with a pink ribbon on her head! It was bizarre. I
probably would have been less surprised to see someone dressed in all
leather like a dominatrix. But she seemed to be a harmless and nice
person
though I couldn't stop from thinking that maybe she had escaped from some
institution. We ended up taking pictures for each other in front of
the falls. I tried to think of an excuse to ask her if I could take
her picture but nothing came to my mind fast enough and the moment was
gone.
My next stop was at a small town called Utoro where I
gassed up and stopped to take a look around. )
It
was only 8:30, just an hour out from the rider house. There were
regularly scheduled tour boats available which took sightseers to see the
tip of the Shiretoko Peninsula. There is no way to get there by road
and I'm guessing deep in that region one could find some real wilderness
and )
)
maybe
even some of the bear that are supposed to be indigenous to the
region. I skipped the boat ride and climbed a nearby lookout point
which was marked on the local tourist map as a good place to get a
view. The point was on a cliff (a huge boulder, really) and, indeed,
the view was worth the climb.
Just past Utoro the road turns and cuts east across the
peninsula. This was another nice road although a bit more crowded
with tourists and bikers by this time.)
There were too many curves to easily pass slower moving vehicles but I was
pretty adept at finding opportunities to pass by this time. A ridge
of mountains runs through the entire peninsula and at the highest point of
the road was a lookout and parking area where I was treated to a nice view
of 1661 meter Mt. Rausu on this picture-perfect morning. The
altitude of the parking area was probably around 1000 meters. There
was a food vendor selling grilled corn on the cob, so I bought one to
snack on while I enjoyed the view. Before I moved on I got a fellow
traveler to take my picture for me.
To the east, in the direction I would be going shortly
I saw the white tops of clouds kind of bunched up against the mountains
down below. They had a real fluffy, pretty look, like those you
might see from an airplane. However, once I got down into them the
day just
became cool and foggy and not particularly interesting. The
coastline here had a sort of Japanese New England feel to it, if that's
possible. Local industry clearly depends on the sea with fishing
boats and implements crowding the shore. I had been hoping to see
the Russian-held islands which have been in dispute since the end of
the second world war but it wasn't possible on this day. I had never
realized how close to Hokkaido they were; they are literally less than 30
km away. The weather also helped me to make a decision to not bother
taking the coastal route around the southeast corner and I cut across from
a town called Shibetsu and headed back west.
My destination now was towards Kushiro and the Kushiro
Shitsugen (Marshlands), Japan's biggest wetland area. It is my
Sapporo friend Chiho's hometown and I just wanted to say that I had been
there.)
The fog became a wet mist and I stopped to don my rain gear once
again. It wasn't a particularly pleasant ride. I stopped at a
wetland viewing area where, if one was lucky, one might get a glimpse of
the Japanese Crane which are indigenous to this area. The fog had
lifted enough to get a view but the view was, basically, that of a big
grassy marsh with nothing else to be seen. I continued on.
This time I found a place to view the Japanese crane where, it looked
like, a couple were being kept in a field just for tourists because there
was a sign announcing their presence. This crane is famous
throughout Japan as a symbol of love and faithfulness because these birds
are reputed to mate for life. I managed to get a halfway decent
picture. Anybody with a point-and-shoot camera was pretty much out
of luck, I had to zoom up to 300mm just to get this shot.
I drove through Kushiro south until I hit the coast
once again and then headed west on Route 38. The wet weather didn't
let up and I kept my eye out for a place to stay. By this time my
modus operandi was to avoid camping in the rain if I could. Although
my little bivy tent could probably keep me dry, I'd still have no place to
change clothes, keep my loose gear, etc. There didn't appear much in
the way of accommodation, not at least according to the signs on the
road. Not even a love hotel in sight. The population here
wasn't big enough to support such luxuries. But then I came upon two
rider houses (youth hostels for cyclists) side-by-side. Both had
motorcycles parked outside already stopped for the day. I was
closest to the one called "Mikki House" and it looked the most
appealing so that's the one I chose.
Mikki House was run by an elderly man and woman. It
was basically their home with a row of about 4 extra rooms as well as an
attached ramen shop. The price was about $10 but there seemed to be
some expectation that you'd eat at their restaurant. When one guy
was going to cook his dinner on his camp stove outside, the woman became
obstinate and refused to allow it. I'm glad I hadn't tried that.
Aside from that incident, she and her husband were
quite nice. She gave me laundry detergent (to assist me in spending
money in her coin laundry machine). I ended up eating dinner with
the guy who had tried to cook his own. His name was Hiroyoshi or
Hiro (pronounced Hero) for short. He was a rare
internationally-minded Japanese guy having spent a year in Florida.
He was from Akashi, near Kobe and had taken the ferry up to Hokkaido from
Kyoto.
There were sinks with running (cold) water for
teeth-brushing and the like. Bathing took place in the old couple's
own quarters. The bathing facility was about the size of a
"unit bath" that you might find in a Tokyo apartment i.e. quite
small, maybe about 1.5 meters square. Like pretty much all Japanese
bathrooms, it was an enclosed shower/bath room where you could freely wash
up and then soak in the tub. This place was clearly old-style as it
did not have a shower head, just a water spigot, a stool and a
bucket. You fill the bucket and dump it over yourself as many times
as necessary to wash up and rinse off. Then, of course, take a dip
in the tub.
With the four rooms, there was capacity for maybe 12-15
people but luckily there were only six that night. After dinner and
while we took turns taking baths, we gathered in one room and had a little
nomikai -- a social gathering usually centered around the activity
of drinking. Hiro pulled out a bottle of bourbon but I only had
enough to be polite and stuck with beer. Any hard stuff and I would
be out like a light in my road-weary state.
All of six of us were motorcyclists. Four of us
were traveling alone and there were two guys from Sapporo traveling
together. One guy was from Yamanashi Prefecture, I already mentioned
Hiro was from the Kobe area and I'm not sure about the sixth guy as he
went to bed right away. )
Surprisingly,
one of the Sapporo guys spoke a bit of English too. He had traveled
in Europe for two months. I say "surprisingly" because in
my experience in living in Japan for several years, I found it very rare
to come across Japanese males who traveled overseas or bothered to try to
learn a foreign language. This was in contrast to well-traveled
females who are plentiful. The guys seem to have other priorities
such as spending their money on cars or working hard to make a career.
These guys were interesting and the conversation took
many turns from the subjects of gay rider houses, overseas travel
experiences and whatnot. Hiro showed me some scars he had picked up
in a rider house in Hokkaido on a previous trip from some sort of bed bug
or flea. I was glad I had opted to camp outside the previous
night. Mikki House seemed clean. The sheets were clearly
clean and fresh but one never knows what is residing in the futons
themselves. I stayed up, enjoying the guys' company as long as I could
but the beer had taken its toll. I set up my futon in the far corner
and crashed around midnight without any further thought about bed bugs..
Go to Previous Day
Go to Next Day