Day 4 - Sand in the Gears
I was woken up at 3am by my wife's telephone call from distant Newcastle. She wasn't particularly happy as she thought she had really messed up the interview due to being so nervous that she could hardly speak English. I tried to make her feel better, but I couldn't sleep myself after that. I turned on the TV and watched this odd programme they have on overnight for hours called 'Music Box' which is basically randomly chosen J-pop songs from the last 20 years accompanied by equally random TV library footage. It is actually quite a good way of seeing the changes in Japanese society and fashion and so on... although it does have a slightly unhealthy tendency to concentrate on schoolgirls (however his too is a not uncommon feature of all sorts of Japanese popular culture).
Eventually I managed to drift off a bit and was woken by my alarm call at 8am, for the usual breakfast.
I should explain a bit about Japanese breakfasts for those of you who think I had been eating porridge every morning. A traditional Japanese breakfast consists of fried fish, boiled rice, a selection of pickles, nori seaweed, miso soup and usually something called 'natto'. Natto is one of the most challenging Japanese foods for foreigners. It is basically semi-fermented whole soybeans, is one of the strongest, stickiest substances known to man, and smells like mouldy coffee. I used to think it tastes that way too, but mixed with the accompanying soy sauce and mustard, I have got to tolerate it if not develop an actual liking for the stuff. For breakfast, what you can do is take some rice, add a bit of natto and wrap the combination in a strip of nori. This is actually quite nice. The breakfasts in hotels often have several addition dishes, in this case a shellfish and rice 'chanko' (a sort of stew/soup cooked on the table).
Today was like a different continent. The sun was up, the sky was an unfamiliar blue colour, and the breeze was light and fluffy. Time for the beach!
The first challenged was trying to work out how to get over/under the massive Toll expressway that has thoughtfully been built all the way along the coast. After carrying The Beast over two pedestrian bridges, I spotted an underpass way over yonder, but it was too late by then. I took a short sandy path through pine trees and could hear the roar of the Pacific surf from over the line of dunes. Cresting the rise, the ocean boiled with a huge swell ahead of me - I could see why surfers frequent this strip in summer. I couldn't come all this way without going in, so I rolled up my now rather pungent 3/4 length bib-shorts, still damp from yesterday's rain, and strode into the waves. Of course the water was still ice cold with winter currents and snow melt and had I been stupid enough to have dived properly might have been fatally cold. Chilling my feet and ankles to the bone was enough for this morning. The sand stuck to my feet and resisted brushing off - that would be coming back to Tokyo with me along with a few shells I picked up for my wife.
The bike was covered in sand too - not from the beach today but from the journey yesterday - and the rear derailleur was making crunchy sand-munching sounds, which continued all day. Sand is one of the best arguments for hub gears!
Stripped down to one layer for the first time on the trip, I sped north along the coast until I got to a fairly minor road that headed inland, north-west. I had decided to avoid the worst part of the Chiba-Tokyo route by taking a curving way north over Chiba on as minor roads as I coudl find before rejoining the main road into Tokyo further on. This meant a few extra km than I had planned originally, but as the weather was good, I was feeling great and had done fewer kilometres the day before, this seemed fine.
And it was for the first half. I passed through an area known for strawberry farming - grown under plastic over winter and now ready for picking. The air was full of the smell of strawberries, and getting off the bigger road I had had to take for a while, I headed up alongside a rural railway line, past the still dry rice fields, and small irrigation channels, before taking a minor road which went up the hill that the main road avoided. I wasn't planning on any serious climbs today and the map didn't seem to be very contoured here, but it was certainly a climb. However my legs felt strong and it was just enjoyable. Coming down the other side, I took even smaller roads though fields rapidly disappearing under new housing developments - the whole of northern Chiba seems to be becoming a dormitory for Tokyo, and developments show no sign of stopping as, despite Japan have now gone over the population peak, people continue to desert the remoter countryside regions for the Greater Tokyo metropolis (now over 30 million people).
From here, it was back into the wasteland. Bigger roads, speeding trucks, badly surfaced pavements, strip malls and diners, and too many people. I even had to wait to be served at lunch - I was definitely back in the city.
I don't know what it is about hot days, but it seems to bring out the poor driving. I had not had any problems on the trip so far from other road users, but I was almost taken out twice during the last half of the last day: by a van driver pulling out almost broad-siding me; by one of those hideous American-style SUVs that are just way too big for narrow Japanese roads, which turned across me despite the fact that the driver knew I was going fast and had right of way - he even laughed as he saw me complaining so I slapped the back of the car and gave him the finger, something I have never done in Japan before. The big problem is that if you show any sign of a negative reaction, especially as a foreigner, people seem to think that you deserved what had previously happened to you, or that you are the problem!
Anyway, it was fast urban warrior stuff again all the way back through the satellite cities of Chiba and back into Tokyo. Partly because I didn't want to end the day on a sour note, and partly because I fancied a nice section of car-free cycling, I headed back to the Ara River cycle route and decided to head round the long bend in the river to where is gets closest to where we live - and extra 10km or so, but my legs felt fantastic and with the sun still warm, kids teams playing baseball and soccer on the riverside pitches, and hundreds of happy runners, walkers, rollerbladers and cyclists out on the tracks, I didn't want the day to end.
Turning back into the city, down the long main road, a guy on a road bike decided to engage me in a bit of a traffic light sprint, and I was pleased that I could take him easily even on my bodged-up Beast, with a backpack on... I felt strong and alive and happy and had a generally good feeling that everything was going to turn out alright.
Back home, I took a long shower and then logged the tour on Cyclogs (about 110km, and my fastest average speed for the tour of around 23km/h), and as we had no food in the flat, went out to get some cheap sushi and smoked almonds from the konbini (convenience store) on the corner. That night, despite all my worries about my wife's interview, I did sleep well.
I'll let you know if the sky over Chiba City is 'the colour of television tuned to a dead channel'... (Neuromancer ref for all the cyberpunks out there...)
) You might think Japan is expensive but for just over £35 a night you get bed, hot spring bath, full local seafood dinner and breakfast. Not bad, eh?
