Date

2022-10-21, Friday

Distance

37.18 km (600 km in total)

Following the doctor’s recommendation, we finished today’s ride earlier, ending our record of biking in the dark for 3 consecutive days.

Today’s ride has little to highlight except one nice encounter in front of the grocery store. A lady who had the experience of bicycle touring in Japan came to talk to us (in Japanese) in a friendly manner that is unusual for Japanese people (with a smile and an unblushingly speaking tone). Such friendliness really encouraged us!

We biked most of the time along the shore, with the ocean on the left side and the hills on the right. The view is quite majestic but at some point it became monotone.

This area feels remote still with little to nothing that hints at humanity between the towns / villages. I have wanted to photograph a Japanese fishing village but everywhere was marked with 'Private. No trespassing' sign that's not inviting at all. I have just come to realise that when photographing the fishing boats in Canada, I was probably stepping on private land. However, in Canada, there is rarely such a warning or physical object set to delineate the boundary between the private and the public. When people see me taking pictures, Canadians usually say hello with a smile, making me even less aware of my trespassing. Although Japanese houses don't tend to have fences, the omnipresence of which around country houses was one of my first shocks when bicycle touring in Europe, the heavy presence of the warning signs is quite intimidating to me.

I noticed that everywhere near the ocean was marked with the elevation of the location. Our guess is that it’s meant for letting people know where to go in case of tsunami evacuation. (Can someone verify our hypothesis?)

We arrived at the Esashi town centre at 1:20pm to find out that all restaurants are either closed or about to close. Most of the time it felt like a ghost town had there not been occasional passing of the vehicles. I am really curious if most people in this town commute to bigger places to work because there seems to be very little industry remaining here.

By 4:30pm, we found a roofed gazebo in a campground that was closed for the season next to the roadside station of Esashi to pitch our tent. The cashier at the roadside station was so caring and afraid that we might get cold by sleeping outdoor as to show us the heated area that will remain accessible to the public after the closing time. Her clear manifestation of care and worry, which may be a rare thing for Japanese people, made me feel really good.

I did use the heated area to comfortably write my diaries when I woke up at midnight. There is even a vending machine that does the magic of producing hot drinks on the spot — imagine this high technology in a rural town of Japan!