November 5, 2025
Day 64 — Kochi to Matsubakawa Camping Ground
Marilee here.
Our route out of Kochi was another backstreet mystery tour from Komoot. Such an enjoyable way to leave a city: passing by shopkeepers opening their doors and setting out their sidewalk displays, moms steering city bikes down the laneways delivering toddlers to daycare, old men taking a morning stroll along the canal banks. These early morning winding side street routes (with the inevitable, multiple wrong turns we take along the way) probably take much longer than just bombing our way straight to the highway, but they’ve become one of my favourite parts of the day.
Once we left the city behind us, we were in gently rolling farmland, with many persimmon and mandarin orchards. It was a grey, misty day, and we caught the occasional hint of citrus in the air as we passed by the mandarin trees. The persimmons are so ripe now they’re dropping from the trees, we’re dodging split sticky lumps of fruit on the roads.
We were doing our best to stay off the main roads, and Komoot was mostly helping in this endeavour, sending us a route that tracked along canal-side dikes through rice paddies, occasionally crisscrossing over bridges from one side the other for reasons that were not evident to us — but we were happy to go along with the arbitrary changeovers. Then, ominously, our paved one-lane road turned to gravel, then to a rutted, muddy track. We persevered for a while, hoping the road would reappear. Nope, Komooted again!
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We detoured to some more frequently travelled roads, which brought us through a succession of small towns.
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As roads in Japan so often do, this one went up into the hills and over a pass to reach the next valley — providing opportunities for scenery admiration and photos, but also much puffing and panting as we pedal up and up.
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We made good time through the morning, so — unusually for us — we decided to break for a proper sit-down lunch. We’ve seen lots of little roadside chain restaurants and we opted to give one of them a try: the Cafe Gusto. As in many places here, you order from a tablet at the table. But at the Cafe Gusto they’ve taken automation a step further — our meal was delivered by a little wheeled robot.
In the afternoon we met up with another cyclist — who turned out to be a Canadian, Will from Montreal, who had started biking in Hokkaido about the same time as us, and was also intending to make his way down to Okinawa. He was heading for a nearby campground for the night, but decided to join us at the campground we had in mind when we told him that it had an onsen nearby. The lure of an onsen is powerful after a day of riding! We rode together for the last hour or so, chatting about our adventures and impressions of Japan, over a succession of increasingly narrow, winding roads to the campground. Which turned out, like many of the campgrounds we’ve been to recently, to be deserted. We set up our tents and then hiked down the forest road a kilometer or so to the hotel that had the onsen, where we were a bit startled to encounter several other foreign tourists in such a remote location. It turned out they were part of a cycling tour group, staying in the onsen hotel.
After our baths, we walked back to our exclusive campground and spent a fun evening eating dinner and chatting, before being lulled to sleep by the sound of the river flowing past the campsite.
Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 3,215 km (1,997 miles)
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