Date

2022-11-23, Wednesday

Distance

90.09 km (2610.14 km in total)

The ride to Nikko was — in one word — miserable. It’s been raining since this morning, and the rain only ended after we had been to bed. Both of us have quality rain gears but we still got so cold that instead of wild camping, we decided to take the shelter in a hostel at night. (Another reason is that the closest roadside station is located in central Nikko, without sufficient space for a tent.)

This hostel in Nikko is currently managed by a Romanian lady who had lived in the UK for a long time. She had been to Nikko before the pandemic and only got this job offer two weeks ago. Having learned Japanese by herself, she likes Japan so much that she would love to live and work in some warm part of this country in the futur. Surprisingly to us, this hostel is full of foreigners who recently landed in Japan; English is thus the common language here. After speaking broken Japanese for more than a month, I need some time to adjust to the linguistic familiarity found at this solitary planet that spins on its own in the entire university of Japan. It’s beyond amazing that everyone shares a common tongue in a foreign country!

We used a combination of Google Map and Komoot to find out a cycle way across Japan. I have briefly discussed the pros and the cons of them in a previous post (see Day 33). Today, another feature became prominent when using the latter. Komoot seems to prefer secondary roads ‘probably’ to avoid traffic if I set it to ‘bike touring’ mode. This means that every now and then, we can get on nameless roads that are prioritised for farming vehicles (農用道路). Such roads, if paved, are actually nice to cycle through because we get to see a much more local landscape brimming with residential houses and farms. At times, we can get into paths through a forest that still looks primitive. This afternoon, we cycled through such a forest path on both side of which trees’ roots are half hinging in the air, half griping the soil that is above the ground level. It’s as if the trees could fall at any instance. The forest looks sublime and terrifying at the same time. We wondered what humans had done to this forest.

We biked the last 10 km or so in rain and in almost complete darkness, as we entered Nikko after the sun set. Vaguely I could feel pedalling along a tree-lined road with magnificent trees to both sides. The gigantic foliage made the surrounding doubly darker. It’s quite strange to come to this presumably glorious place (‘nikko’ in Japanese means sunlight) in near-darkness …