October 31, 2025 to November 1, 2025
Days 59 and 60 — Tokushima to Ebisuhama
Marilee here.
We spent a very wet Halloween in Tokushima, watching the rain pelt down outside our hotel windows. Tom tinkered with the bikes (which were staying nice and dry down in the hotel’s underground parking garage), trying to dial in our gears which have been slipping a bit recently. I spent some time thinking about the next phases of our trip, planning out our time in Thailand, where we’ll be spending Christmas and meeting up with our kids for a couple of weeks in January. The day passed surprisingly quickly, and we were very gratified that it rained so hard (over 100mm!), thus justifying our wisdom in staying put indoors.
November 1 dawned bright and sunny, and we leapt onto our bikes with renewed vigour. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration — but we did clamber on and set off again, sometime after 9am (after making sure we did full justice to the breakfast buffet of course).
The first part of the day was the usual getting out of town grind along the highway, but Komoot did its best to liven things up for us, directing us off the highway and into the surrounding residential/agricultural areas where we would thread our way between rice paddies and back alleyways for a few hundred meters before the maze of lanes led us back to the highway — only to do the same thing a few minutes later when Komoot would find another short-lived alternative to the highway. So we made slow progress, but the glimpses that these back routes offer us into regular life in small Japanese towns and cities is fascinating. I love checking out everyone’s gardens — we’ve seen everything from eggplant to chili peppers being grown (green onions and cabbage are the hands-down gardener’s favorites).
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
Shikoku is a small island, about 1000km in circumference, and its tourism board promotes it as a cycling destination with a “Shikoku Circuit Cycling Route” that loops the island, so bike lanes were a little more in evidence here than we’d seen elsewhere. As well, there is a famous ancient pilgrimage route that also hugs the coastline, known as the Shikoku Henro or the 88 Temples Pilgrimage (as you can probably guess, it involves trekking to 88 temples) and we began to see walkers by the side of the road, some of them dressed in white, wearing straw hats and carrying bamboo walking staffs - the traditional pilgrim garb. While we certainly didn’t intend to visit all 88 temples (some of them involve stiff climbs into the hills), we were hoping that at least a few of the temples would intersect with our route through the island. That turned out to be the case!
Early in the afternoon we detoured from the highway, taking a side road across a river to follow signs to a temple, and climbing up a steep set of mossy stairs to arrive at a lonely, tree-shadowed hilltop temple site. The statuary included a usual depiction of a boatload of rather jolly looking souls, which we quite enjoyed. After leaving the temple, we continued on the side road, which took its time returning to the highway, sending us deeper and deeper into the woods along a road that got smaller and smaller — but eventually we popped back out into civilization, to discover that our long detour had only taken us a few hundred metres further down the highway.
Our end goal for the day was a campground near the coast. We realized that the six weeks we’d spent in Honshu, entirely inland the whole time, had been the longest we’d gone without seeing the ocean since moving to Vancouver almost thirty years ago! So we were looking forward to getting near a beach again.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
The campground, when we arrived in late afternoon, was tiny and quickly got crowded with campers (it is another long weekend here in Japan — their calendar is absolutely peppered with national holidays), most of them there for the fishing. Down the road from the campground was a pier lined with hopefuls out with their fishing rods. One man showed us his set-up: he had a tank of small fish he was using for bait, with sea water being pumped through it to keep them lively, and he was catching squid (so a squid-jigger?). He had one good-sized specimen already, wrapped in a cooler.
Sadly, there was no fresh seafood on the menu for us tonight — we slurped down some noodles and were in bed soon after sunset.
Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 2,958 km (1,837 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 3 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |