Shirane-San…
Rosie looked at the map of our planned route for the day for a moment… No doubt the hills of the previous few day’s riding through the Gunma Prefecture north-west of Tokyo were still on her mind…
‘That road looks fucked…’
Breakfast this day was in the small agricultural village of Kuni. Kuni has an onsen, a small michi-no-eki and that’s about it. After a long soak in the sulphurous goodness, our first of the trip, we set the tent up free standing in the onsen carpark because there literally was not another flat surface within a kilometres ride in either direction…
The morning ritual of getting the tent dry, getting packed and getting sunscreened out of the way and we were on the road. Straight away, the road headed upwards… If you have a look at said ‘fucked’ road on the map above you’ll notice Kuni at about 750 metres elevation… Our goal for the day was to reach 2172 metres, then decend off the back to Yamanouchi on the outskirts of Nakano… Long day on loaded bikes, especially this early in the trip…
We were both feeling the climbing on the first few days, which took us from the small city of Chichibu, through Tomioka and over Haruna San and her crater lake… Making sure we were eating enough was going to be something we were going to have to keep an eye on to avoid mega hunger flats… Like this one…
By the time we reached Kusatsu, Rosie was running on empty… Lucky for us (and for anyone riding a bike around in Japan) the convenience stores there are AMAZING… Chances are if you feel like it and it isn’t a meat pie you can get it. And it will be cheap and yummy… Gyoza and a strawberry milk? No problem… DOUBLE hot dog and a beer? Done…
The convenience stores really are one of the things that make Japan a great place for cycle touring. There were very few days where we were required to carry more that a days food… Try that in Australia!
From Kusatsu the road continued up, without really any kind of break, to the peak of Shirane-San… Twenty one kilometres of climbing probably doesn’t sounds like a whole lot of fun to most (Rosie definitely wasn’t looking forward to it) but it surprised us both… The immaculate hot mix road snaked it’s way up from Kusatsu, through a few kilometres of densely wooded forest and then spat us out on the upper slopes…
That’s at about the 1700 metre mark… From there it was an hour of horrible smelling sulfur vents and the crazy contrast between the lush green and the exposed, smoking earth that accompanies them… Hard to describe how cool a place this was to be on a bicycle…
Aaaannnndddddd up some more…
From there it was past the crater (which isn’t actually at the top) and up again to the peak…
Five or so hours of climbing since Kuni, and we arrived at the windy summit…
It always seemed unfair to me that five hours climbing equates to only about thirty five minutes descending, but man, WHAT a thirty five minutes… I filmed this descent but my little Canon point and shoot just couldn’t handle the g-forces and the footage isn’t worth watching… Hot mix and hairpins and almost zero traffic all the way down…
Being our first real encounter on the trip with volcanoes, things like this still made us go ‘Whhaaa???’
And then we were at Yamanouchi where a michi-no-eki urban camp, a new friend and some cold beer awaited us…
Stay tuned, more soon…
A Therapy For Pain 