Chapter 3: CHAPTER THREE

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CHAPTER THREE

“Nothing but mountains everywhere! John, I don't believe this! And the air. It's so delicious! Are you sure we're still in Kyoto City?”

John pointed back along the road clinging to the mountains. “Actually, we crossed the boundary out of the city itself when we drove through that long tunnel. But remember those cedar-lumbering villages along the cliff about 10 kilometers back? They were still in it and we're still in Kyoto Prefecture.” He pointed in a different direction. “See that village way down there? It's called Shuzan. What do you think of it?”

“It looks like a travel poster!” And did, nestled where two narrow river valleys cutting through the rolling cedar-covered mountains came together.

John pointed to the far horizon. “The mountains go on like this all the way up to the Sea of Japan about a hundred kilometers from here on our bikes. You can catch a car ferry from there that will take you and your cub all the way up to Hokkaido, really great biking up there in the summer. Now let's go back and see if your engine's cooled enough to go on.”

We walked back to where I'd parked my tiny cub next to his 250cc monster. John cautiously brushed his fingers against the cub's engine, nodded. “Remember, next time you have to downshift into first going up a steep mountain road on one of these things, don't go a klick over twenty or you'll melt the poor engine. Ditto where you have to engine-brake going down a mountain. You're going to be doing a lot of both from here on. Also remember to drive on the left here, particularly where there's no center line. The road gets really narrow in a lot of places. But believe me, the scenery gets even better from here on.”

“John, the scenery can't get any better.”

Man, was I wrong!

John nursed me down that mountain road, zoomed me through the narrow village and valley, led me up and down two more gorgeous mountain ranges, then over long suspension bridges that formed part of the road following a meandering river with picture-postcard farmhouses on the other side of it surrounded by waving green rice paddies hugging the far mountain range and on and on for three more hours of scenic wonders with hardly a car in sight. Then splat! we were right back in the neon-signed exhaust-fuming bumper-to-bumper congestion, smog and noise of Kyoto City proper and John zipped us into a Mr. Donut.

Sipping his coffee, John flipped his road atlas open to a map of multicolored spaghetti. "This is the way Japan looks to most drivers.”

“Yech!”

“Right. One endless traffic jam.” He flipped to another page. “But this is the way Japan looks to me.”

“There's only one road on the whole map!”

John nodded. “Some of the best biking country in the world. And look at how much of it there is.” He flipped through white page after white page with only one or two squiggly red lines on them.

“Man, a whole different world!”

“And this atlas is only for our Kansai area. Most of the rest of Japan is just like it.” John flipped to the inside cover giving the grids for all the maps inside the atlas and traced a small triangle of roads just north of Kyoto. “And that's all you saw of it today. You've got a week's vacation time coming up. So get on your cub and go!”

Submitted: November 06, 2018

Romance romance japan gaijin travel-in-japan japan-1970s

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B Douglas Slack

Within three months of arriving in Misawa, without wife, I was buzzing around the countryside in my newly-purchased old '65 Nissan Cedric. It was built like a tank, drove like a tank, and consumed gas like a tank, but it would go anywhere I pointed it. Outside city limits==any city--the countryside is a perfect as you've described.

Bill

Wed, November 7th, 2018 9:30pm