Tsukuba trip #1 (Ibaraki Prefecture)
21-25 May 2024: A sentimental multi-modal journey to Tokyo and the Kantō plain to visit old friends and make new connections.
One of the delights of bicycle touring is in the people we meet along the way. My initial excursions to Hamamatsu and to Shiga Prefecture began as simple go-there/come-back challenges; but the small encounters en route—sitting in on coffee-shop banter, or chatting at roadside with a local cyclist—were the real heart of both experiences. Travel by bike catalyzes rapport at both ends of a conversation: folks that we meet (the good folks, at least) respect the obvious effort that we’re putting into the journey; and we ourselves are primed for human contact after hours spent pedalling our lonely course. And so these small memories have staying power beyond their potential as grist for the Instagram mill.
With thoughts like these in mind, I put together a bike-centered excursion to Kantō, aiming not just to “go and come back,” but to visit with friends old and new, at waypoints along an ambitious route spanning Tsukuba, Sendai, Tokyo, and Kanagawa. It looks a bit daunting when laid out on a map as below (and would have given me pause, if I’d gone to the trouble of drafting this overview map before setting out), but the terrain is pretty flat by Japanese standards so, you know, why not.
The route mapped above begins from Tokyo Station, so as in the Okayama trip I used Shinkansen for the main intercity segment. The house is an hour and a half from Nagoya Station by bike.
- GPX data: Nisshin ↣ Nagoya Station
The logistics of the first day were fiddly: ride from home in Nisshin to Nagoya Station; break down the bike and repack the luggage for Shinkansen travel; zip to Tokyo Station; rebuild the bike; ride to the campground in Tsukuba; and then pitch the tent, preferably before dark. So I set off before sun-up, to catch the first Shinkansen to Tokyo. This snap was taken after sunrise, midway to Nagoya Station at the Yamate Dōri intersection on the north edge of the Nagoya University campus.
The first photo below is the prelude to what could have been a disaster. Inside the bag, the front wheel of the bike has been removed and strapped to the frame, the handlebars are turned 90° to the right and strapped in place, and the bike is standing on its rear wheel. It’s not stable in this position! I sat down, and a couple with a child between them occupied the three seats across the aisle. As we accelerated out of the station, the bike tipped over into the aisle with a loud crash! There was no damage to the bike, but more importantly (so much more importantly) there was no one (and no child!) standing there when it came down. I turned the bike over to rest it firmly on its not-a-wheel handlebar stub.
The duffle bag, a last-minute purchase before the Okayama tour, saw repeated service on this tour. It’s an extra thing to haul around when the bike is set up with panniers, but a necessary extra for multi-modal transport.
And I was proud of myself for clearing the refrigerator and making use of potatoes that I dug from the garden a day or two before leaving on the trip!
I found a snazzy location for a start-of-ride selfie at Tokyo Station. So much clean! So many window!
The ride to Tsukuba would be 70 kilometers, and I looked forward to making good time, with much of the course lying along river embankments.
It was about 9:00 by the time I was ready to roll. I was more concerned with reaching Tsukuba before dark than with scenery, and I haven’t any photographs of the journey. I do remember being struck by the number of foreign tourists in Tokyo. Nagoya sees some tourism downtown, but in suburbs like Nisshin there’s only a smattering of foreigners, and we’re mostly here for work. So it was fun to weave through a different street scene atmosphere, people-watching along the way.
There was a lot of stop-and-go at controlled intersections until I reached the river segments in Saitama, but after that it was smooth sailing. I think it was during the first embankment run along the Edo River that I began feeling the heat, stopped at a rest area to take on water at a fountain, and was surprised to see a mini-van yatai roll up. I bought a soft ice cream from them, cooled off a little more, and rolled on.
There were occasional bikes on the river courses, mostly older guys in Lycra on high-end racing machines, but a few students and commuters as well on more modest—and practical—rides.
Further north, riding along the Kokai River on the approach to Tsukuba, I paused in the shade of trees that a crew was engaged in pruning a bit further on. I had packed for the possibility of rain, but on this and the remaining days of the trip there would be clear weather, not yet the full heat of summer, but warm enough to stop in in the shelter of shade when the opportunity arose.
In due course I arrived at the Yukari no Mori campground and pitched my tent among the others. It was my first visit to Tsukuba, and I had been surprised to find a campground so close to city center—just a few minutes by bicycle. The streets are an odd mix of car-centric, car-dominant throughfares, but sometimes with wide sidewalks to accomodate bicycles (and sometimes not). It has the low-density feel of an American suburb, with shopping concentrated in superstores, but without the systematic suburban sprawl: rice fields and farmland take over abruptly at the edges of the city. Tsukuba was originally carved out of farmland beginning in the 1970s to make a home for a new national university and associated research facilities. It’s a planned city and a product of its era, when Beach Boys were on the radio.
The campground seemed safe enough, and I just left the tent in place when I rode out on errands over the next two days. The first of these was an izakaya where I had yakitori and a beer or two, finishing with a yaki-nigiri. The atmosphere was bright enough, with local folk coming off work dropping in for a drink and a chat; but it was my first encounter with QR-code-and-order-from-your-smartphone logistics (which seems to have taken off everywhere), and it felt very odd to be tapping at a website when I was sitting at the counter and looking directly at the two staff working the orders. I didn’t hang around.
The nearest convenience store was just a few minutes away from the campground.
The Nagi Saen campground, where I’d stay on the Hamamatsu trip) (but somehow neglected to even mention in that early post!), was similarly just a short ride from a Lawson; but that campground was on an island accessed over bridges, not embedded directly in the city, so extra points to Tsukuba for convenience-store convenience. Feast your eyes on that parking lot, though: as I said, Tsukuba is a car-centric town.
On the first full day in Tsukuba, I rode south to the Fujimidai district on a special errand.
- GPX data: Yukari no Mori Campground ↣ Fujimidai
Backing up just a little, when my wife and I lived in London, she
taught classes in dried flower arrangement and crafting. When we moved
to Nagoya around the turn of the millenium, she turned to other
things, and the materials went into storage. Since she passed away
with ALS two years ago, I’ve been gradually working to get her
materials into the hands of people who can make use of them. Through
the fediverse, I made contact with @[email protected] in
Ibaraki Prefecture, and she kindly agreed to receive several
boxes. When I came to a collection of sea shells, they seemed rather
too heavy to ship, and I brought them along on the trip for hand
delivery. That was my task on the first day in Tsukuba.
The ultimate delivery was a private matter, and I’ve no photos to splash on social media; but a couple of scenes attracted the camera lense on the way down. The first was a strikingly sleek police station. Police boxes here are utilitarian buildings, and often have some age on them, and a rather drab appearance. For reasons unknown, the police boxes of Tsukuba are well appointed and decked out in attractive livery. I’ve no idea why. Priorities I guess.
There’s much picturesque beauty in the Japanese countryside, and the train system on the main island is modern, well maintained, and generally amazing. But it’s not like six-lane freeways and the lobbying that gets them built don’t exist here.
On the ride back from Fujimidai, I stopped in at a Brazilian restaurant for a hearty meal of steak and potatoes. That was great, but sat a little heavy with all the heat and exertion, and as dinnertime rolled around I had a craving for something lighter.
Meanwhile, I began mulling over the rough plan for the trip back. The
original idea had been to hang out in Tsukuba on the third day,
spending much of it visiting with a colleague and friend at the
university, to camp for a third night, and then ride to Tokyo on the
fourth. It was an ambitious target, given that I’d arranged to meet
@[email protected] for coffee IRL midway in Misato. I began
to think that it might be too ambitious.
My friend had a tight schedule with work, and needed to give priority to the care of his wife, who was down with a fever. We agreed to just meet for a chat outside their place in the morning. That opened the afternoon as potential travel time. An alternative plan was hatching, as reflected in the following real-time post to social media:
On the bike for three hours again today, and the legs are feeling it. Had a good nap in the PM, and tomorrow is mostly a rest day, but will explore campgrounds in Chiba within range of an afternoon push tomorrow. That would relieve some pressure on Friday, which will otherwise be quite a stretch.
Hankering for something light for the evening meal, a search turned up an udon restaurant that was some distance away. Although weary from another day of pushing the pedals, I set off in search of dinner.
The Yamabiko-Benten udon restaurant proved to be on the southern edge of the amorphous core of the city. It was getting dark near the end of the ride there, and the route turned into an area with a lot of marshalling yards and heavy equipment going on. I began to worry that I’d completely messed up the navigation when I came to a turning into forest and down a small hill, and there it was. The photo below is too dark to make out much, but the interior was bright, there were plenty of customers, the udon was indeed pulled and cut by hand in full view of the dining area, and the meal was excellent. Recommended if you find yourself in Tsukuba!
I returned to camp, showered, and slept, and the sun rose on a third day at Yukari no Mori campground.
After breakfast and packing, I visited the nearby convenience store to
stock up on water. Following through on my musings of the day before,
I cast around for a midway camping site, and scored a spot in Sōka,
which seemed near to @[email protected]’s physical address.
With the day’s destination set, I set off to my friend’s place on the other side of the shopping district.
We had a good visit in the garden plaza of my friend’s condominium, a stone’s throw from the express train to the big city, pictured below.
We were able to enjoy a leisurely conversation because the day’s ride was a short one, thanks to the new stopover in Sōka.
I don’t have photos of the return journey from Tsukuba, and to be honest it’s kind of a blur in memory. I just followed the navigation as the road unfolded ahead. As I neared the target campground, though, I grew worried again. Sōka is a proper industrial town. There are factories. And marshalling yards. And smoke stacks. And big rigs roaring over the roads everywhere, belching smoke and kicking up plumes of dust. The prospects for finding a campground amidst the chaos seemed vanishing small. But trusting that I hadn’t screwed up the address I pressed on, and a copse of trees eventually emerged on the horizon.
Sōka Park is an oasis in its industrial surroundings and a refuge for the surrounding community. Counter staff at the office were very kind, and helpful in getting me pointed toward the camping area on the far side of the entrance. It was a good long walk—it’s quite a large park, and bike riding is not permitted on the grounds. The broad path leading to goal passed a large open field on the left where frisbees were in flight; and a fenced-in baseball diamond on the right, probably reserved for intramural games. The campground was on the embankment behind the baseball diamond, and pretty clearly used mostly for post-match barbecues and the like. It was dark under a canopy of trees, and the bare ground was pounded hard, with protruding tree roots making it a little tricky to find a level space.
I nipped over to a local market for shopping and had dinner at an Indian restaurant. I’d had a shower at the Tsukuba campground the previous day, but I was feeling pretty grimy from the day’s ride, and since Sōka Park didn’t have shower facilities, I checked around for public baths and settled on the Tōryū-yū public bath.
On the way to the bathhouse, I took this snap of the view immediately across the street from the park. I wasn’t joking about the park serving as an oasis amidst industrial chaos.
The Tōryū-yū public bath was only a short ride away—so let’s flag this as my third super-easy, not-at-all-inconvenient campground.1 The bath itself was fine, very 庶民的 as they say (i.e. homey, unpretentious). People sometimes complain about refusal of service for tatoos at Japanese public baths, but about half of the guys in this bath had full-body tatoos and it all seemed pretty normal. I sat in a solo jacuzzi for a good long while and came out ready for a good night’s sleep and the next day’s challenge.
The air under the trees shading the campsite was close and humid, and the moquitoes were ferocious. The tent kept them at bay, but one did sneak in, bothered me through the evening. I was too tired and sleepy to bother chasing it down, but annoyed enough to hold a grudge. In the morning I zipped up the flap after rolling out, leaving it nowhere to buzz off to as I collapsed the tent for transport, and that was the end of its bloodline, so to speak.
So I packed up the gear and rode the short distance to the Stark
Cafe,
where I’d arranged to meet @chanclatrix.
- GPX data: Sōka Park Campground ↣ Stark Cafe
I arrived early, while staff were still prepping for opening. There hadn’t been any mains access at Sōka Park, and the phone batteries were running low, so I slunk around the building with a view to stealing some electricity. I found a pay phone with an open outlet, plugged in the charger with a battery pack, and stepped away all nonchalant and indifferent. I was a little worried when staff of the offices next to the booth arrived to tidy up for opening. They gave the phone booth a good dusting and the sidewalk a good sweeping, but if they noticed my tiny crime they let it pass.
I had a good long chat with @chanclatrix, although I probably talked too
much. She’s a superb conversationalist though and a patient listener, and I
didn’t feel even slightly guilty; and I even did some listening
myself. And with that, I was back on the road.
The stopover in western Tokyo was both a nice midpoint break between Saitama and Yokohama, and an opportunity to visit a family I’ve known since my first days in Japan.
About the stopover arrangements, though … this tour incidentally fell in the middle of an influx of tourists from overseas, drawn to Japan by the loosening of pandemic immigration controls and by a slide in the value of the yen. When it came to making reservations, every business hotel that I contacted in Setagaya was fully booked, and the only opening was for the Wabisabi Hostel, which turned out to be an AirBnB conversion.
- GPX data: Stark Cafe ↣ Wabisabi Hostel
It was a surprisingly short hop from Saitama to Setagaya, and I was on track to arrive at the hostel in good time—good enough to contact my friends to move our meeting forward to that evening, which relieved some pressure on the next day’s trek across Kanagawa.
When navigation indicated that I had arrived, the only business on the street seemed to be a hair salon with a pristine Rivendell cruiser parked in front. I greeted a man standing next to it, who turned out to be an Argentinian, the owner of the bike, and a customer of the hair salon. We admired his bike for a bit, and he enthusiastically recommended the Blue Lug bike shop in the area, as a very pricey but also very elegant source for two-wheeled transport (as we chatted, we tactfully avoided mention of my mud-spattered Surly Cross Check lest its feelings be hurt). When talk turned to my predicament, he looked about and immediately spotted the hostel—it was just two doors away, I had looked straight at it and missed it.
Location was just the first layer of the onion. I had expected staff to be on hand, but there were none: this was my first encounter with an AirBnB rental managed through an iPad bolted to the outside of the building. After a fit of ranting to myself and some thrashing about in the mails I’d received from the booking agency, I figured out the process, which I think ran something like this (actual mileage may vary):
- Install the booking agency’s app on my phone;
- Visit a website linked in the confirmation mail to trigger the app and reveal a key code;
- Open the iPad bolted to the wall and enter the key code;
- Obtain a PIN number and room/bunkbed assignment from the iPad;
- Enter the unlocked door of the hostel and use the PIN number to open a small locker with the assigned number;
- Take a key and a paper containing a map and a further PIN number from the locker, use the map to navigate to the assigned room, type the second PIN number into its lock, and dump my gear on the assigned bunkbed (the key was for a locker in the bunk room, to hold valuables).
In other words, the check-in procedure, like some movies, proved to be so bad it was good. The facilities themselves were better than fine for my particular travel needs, with a full kitchen and laundry facilities as well as shared WC and shower. I cleaned up and headed off to my friends’ place.
My friends’ neighborhood was just a short hop away. What could be easier?
- GPX data: Wabisabi Hostel ↣ Akautsumi
Yes, that was foreshadowing. At Sōka Park and at Wabisabi Hostel, I had doubted navigation that turned out to be correct when I stuck with it. En route to my friends’ house, navigation flagged a Y fork in the road, recommending the right-hand branch. All I could see was a road bending to the left, so I committed to it, and navigation quickly recomputed a revised route, with a funny little mark in the middle of it that I hadn’t seen before.
In real life, that funny little mark translated into three flights of concrete stairs leading to the top of the world.
I must have misread the map on the way out: after our dinner, I reversed navigation and the return route didn’t include the staircase. Back at the hostel, I turned in and slept soundly, under a roof for the first time in three days.
To begin the day in style, I searched for a local non-franchise coffee shop, and settled on Paddlers Cafe, which seemed by its photos online to have a rustic atmosphere and to cater to cyclists.
- GPX data: Wabisabi Hostel ↣ Paddlers Cafe
The online images of the cafe (as shown below) were spot on, down to the clutch of bikes parked in front and the queue at the entrance. As I locked up my loaded Cross Check, I noticed that the bike next to it also had Ortlieb panniers, and at that moment its owner, a friendly American, commented on his way out, “Oh, I see that we buy our bikes from the same shop” or so. I … guess he was maybe also referring to the Blue Lug bike shop? Small world? As he mounted his bike to zip off, he assured me that there were many lovely people in Paddlers Cafe. It’s apparently quite the thing in the neighborhood.
When my turn came in the queue, I ordered, took my place on a stool at the window, and woke up over people-watching and a nice latte. Exiting the cafe, another customer, an English journalist, commented on the loaded panniers. It emerged that her father is a touring cyclist, and was soon to undertake a ride commencing in Tōhoku and extending to a circuit around Hokkaidō. In his eighties. I doubt that I’ll last that long, but you never know. Hope springs eternal!
From Paddlers Cafe I set off directly for a former student’s place in Sagamihara, my last visit of the trip.
- GPX data: Paddlers Cafe ↣ Sagamihara
Again a long ride, and again much of it is pretty much a blur. I remember cycling beside a massive queue of cars on Tsukui-michi (津久 井道), an historic highway route across the center of Kanagawa. I also remember a cyclist on a road bike drawing beside me on a broad tree-lined bikeway somewhere near Sagamihara, and its rider complimenting me on the Surly, as he aspired to get into touring. Bikes, man, they bring us together.
I arrived at my former student’s place around noon, her mother kindly fed me a lunch of fried noodles, and the five of us (with her son, and daughter) played a couple of rounds of board game involving sets of numeric tokens at which I predictably did not excel (!).
My student’s family are from Mongolia, and we had been swapping visits recently: they came down at Christmas time last year and brightened up my abode in Nisshin; and earlier this (Gregorian) year they hosted me during their own New Year on the lunar calendar. On that earlier occasion, we visited a local Buddhist temple together.
Fed and rested from the midday visit, I pressed on to Shin-Yokohama Station.
- GPX data: Sagamihara ↣ Shin-Yokohama Station
Two experiences on the ride from Sagamihara to Shin-Yokohama stand out in memory. Both relate to safety. In one, I fell in behind a local cyclist on a long embankment promenade. He was making good time, and I kept the same pace as we weaved among walkers out for an afternoon stroll along the river. Following another rider becomes hypnotic, and while the leader of a group will alert riders behind of potholes and other issues coming up, a solo rider is naturally just focused on getting to where they’re going. Following my “partner” on a fully loaded touring bike was pushing things, and some of the walkers I passed looked apprehensive. When slipping in haste past a set of bollards, the right rear pannier struck the steel fence lining the promenade with a clang, and it finally registered that this was a me problem: I dropped the pace.
The other was more alarming, and also involved following another solo rider. Approaching an uncontrolled intersection with a four-lane strode from a side street, I waited with a local cyclist alongside cars waiting for an opening to cross. At a gap in traffic, the cyclist set off, and I followed. While crossing the road, I glanced at navigation, and saw that I needed to take a right-hand turn beyond the intersection. The rider I was following headed on straight, so I veered right—and saw the bumper of a car just clear the right rear pannier as the driver hit his brakes. Dividing my attention between the road, the rider ahead (again!) and navigation, I had nearly caused an accident and could easily have gotten myself injured and the bike broken.
I take better care not to follow other riders now.
Nearing Shin-Yokohama station, I paused at the side of the road and reserved a Shinkansen seat with luggage space for the return journey on the SmartEX app, budgeting time for breaking down the bike. And soon I was on the platform waiting for the train.
Unlike the return from Okayama, the bike this time was a touring “native”, so of course I rebuilt it on arrival at Nagoya and just rode the 90 minutes home.
Adding up the segments, I travelled 355 kilometers over the five days, had five good visits along the way, and learned a little about road safety. As I posted to the socials after getting home: “Priceless.”
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Sorry, I know it’s lame out of context, but I couldn’t resist leveraging Ryan George’s Pitch Meeting tag line. I’m a boomer, go easy on me. 😊 ↩︎