With only a few days remaining before I fly out and some bad weather expected between now and then, I took advantage of a fairly calm moment to get in one last and somewhat short ride on my fat bike. Rather than subject any of my bikes to the salty local roads, I took one of my favourite roads less traveled. However, calling it a road is somewhat misleading.
In a strictly legal sense it is a road but one where where most vehicles fear to tread. Originally it was a fire department access but even that use is obsolete these days. However, if you don’t mind riding through some streams and over a couple of bridges that would not look out of place in an Indiana Jones movie, it is doable on a fat bike. Not a bad ride with my dog giving it his highest, two paws up, rating. The roads I encounter in Africa will likely be an improvement.
The longest journey begins with a single step or so said Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. That may be so but a bicycle tour begins well before that first step with a lot of planning and packing. For a compulsive, got to have everything in order, personality like mine, this takes months as I reevaluate, reconsider and review nearly every detail and still screw up something. This time, on a trip to a warmer climate to test my new bicycle and to get in some longer distance rides, I managed to leave both my helmet and bicycle lock behind and beyond a reasonable means of getting them returned to me to me in time.
Fortunately, getting replacements was within my budget, so all ended well but I still gave myself a mental tongue lashing for being so forgetful. I just hope it is not a sign of my advancing years or I might wind up leaving my dentures somewhere.
Getting every necessary item for a month of riding and camping in areas where replacements are not just an Amazon click away, into the proper sized luggage for a 35 hour transit, is a big chore and I must have packed, measure and weighed my load a dozen time before being satisfied, for now. I hope this holds true until my departure.
Having taken my bike across two continents as well as nearly across Europe and across South Korea and Japan, I decided to try something a bit further from my comfort zone. Africa was pretty far out to my mind and so my next two wheeled journey is headed for its center, Livingston and Victoria Falls. 3,000 kilometers of mixed asphalt and dirt roads later I hope to ride high and proud into Cape Town. This blog follows that journey.
Our last bus day for this adventure. From here on to Sapporo we will ride except for a 45 minute bus ride to get around a landslide and a ferry ride to get to our last island since our bikes do not tread water. We are all anxious to get back onto two wheels but our stop midway through our bus ride today was well worth the time.
Midway between Tokyo and Nasu is the town of Nikko, home to a large collection of shrines. It is stunningly beautiful and there is a Japanese saying: “Never say ‘kekkō’ until you’ve seen Nikkō” which means, “Never say I am satisfied until you have seen Nikko.” Here you will find shrines favored by Japan’s most powerful shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who you may know from the Shogun mini-series a few decades ago. It is also where his mausoleum can be found. The entire area is a major draw for Japanese and international tourists and there are many ways that you and your tourism currency can be separated. The economy of the entire city is built around servicing the shrines and the multitudes that come to visit.
The is also home to the original three monkeys of, hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil fame. They form one of eight panels telling a moral tale to teach children how to avoid trouble in life. Other shrines allow people to make a small donation and wish for luck. They sometime give advice such as, “A smile brings luck, financial luck, and healthy longevity.”
You can also pay a visit to the Good Relationship Rabbit, a golden statue featuring a rabbit holding a polished ball made of lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli is considered a sacred stone and said to increase insight and determination as well as remove evil thoughts bringing good luck and success. The golden rabbit holding the stone is a symbol of good luck. Toss in a few coins, clap your hands and make a wish.
From Nikko we traveled onto another resort town, the beautiful mountainside village of Nasu, known for its hot springs, mountain views and numerous vacation possibilities. For us it is a place to get our bikes and minds ready for the rides that lay ahead.
Leaving Aizuwakamatsu was not a picnic. We started right into our first climb of the day but with early morning commuter traffic added to the mix. None of us were sorry to see the route finally veer off the well traveled path and into more rural surroundings. It was another day of climbs this time up into the hills formed by the volcano that we could see from our lunch stop the day before. Mount Bandai, while not as big a Mount Aso encountered earlier in the trip, was still a formidable taskmaster. However, once we made it to the top of the climb we were treated to some outstanding views including a look back to where we we ate lunch yesterday. As we climbed and circumnavigated our way around the numerous volcanoes in this area we could see where the caldera blowout of 1888 still scars the land.
A B and B getting back in its feet
Further on we could see steam rising from Mount Azuma-kofuji, another active volcano from this land of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. We could also see signs of how Covid wrecked parts of the Japanese economy and how some enterprising businesses are trying to bring it back.
However, the story of the day is our journey down from volcano-land to the city of Fukushima. You may wonder why that name sounds familiar as did I. On 11 March 2011, at 14:46 JST (05:46 UTC), a 9.0–9.1 undersea earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km (45 mi) east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tōhoku region. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth largest on record in the world. It created tsunami waves that may have reached heights of up to 40.5 meters (133 ft) and which traveled 10 kilometers inland. The residents of Sendai had only ten minutes of warning before waves traveling at nearly 700 kilometers per hour struck their city. The official figures released in 2021 reported 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing. However, the story that captured the world’s attention was what happened at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
Fukushima
When the earthquake struck, automated systems automatically shut down the reactors and a series of safety protocols were enacted. The reactor shutdown interrupted the electrical supply triggering the backup generators to supply power to the critical cooling systems in the reactor itself. However, the tsunami that followed the earthquake washed over the reactor walls and flooded the backup generators causing the cooling system to fail and the reactor to overheat to the point of meltdown. This resulted in three hydrogen gas explosions that breached reactor containment and released radioactive contamination into the air for the next four days. All told, some 110,000 residents were evacuated from the communities surrounding the plant due to the rising off-site levels of ambient ionizing radiation caused by airborne radioactive contamination from the damaged reactors. Even larger amounts of radioactive materials were released into the ocean.
Since 2011 the Japanese government has instituted a massive clean up campaign and local radiation levels in this area are now back to pre 2011 levels. There have also been changes in operational protocols and backup generator locations and redundancy instituted here and at many other nuclear power generation facilities around the world. It was a difficult and expensive lesson to be learned especially in the cost of human lives. Before those reading this put this experience among their reasons why nuclear power is bad, I should point out that all forms of energy production have a cost in both environmental and human terms. Coal production costs lives and destroys large swatches of land. Natural gas and the fracking and water injection used to produce it contaminate ground water. Solar and wind are not free rides either. Every form of energy has its price and when you total the cost nuclear is no worse than most and generally better environmentally even with Fukushima and other accidents that we hopefully learn something from. In any event, I sleep tonight in Fukushima and I shall sleep soundly and without worries.
