Chapter 4: CHAPTER FOUR

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[AUTHOR'S NOTE: From here on I'm sure you will enjoy this story much more if you can follow the routes as the story progresses. The best way I have found to get a scrollable map to follow the routes is to google “Google Maps Kyoto in English.” Hopefully, you will get a map with Kyoto in the center with all the routes and place names written in English and Japanese. If not, try googling “Google.co.jp” or “Google Japan” and then the above. I hope you can get it. If you can, you will be able to scroll, zoom in, zoom out, etc. to follow all the routes and places mentioned.

WARNING: This story is an historical. Even if you do get the map, please ignore the largest lines, e.g. (National Route) 478 as they are expressways that hadn't been built in the 1970s when this story takes place. And even if they had been, no motorcycles of less than 250cc would have been allowed on them -- kw]

PART II

SHIRAKAWA

CHAPTER FOUR

Billowing with enthusiasm and wearing a ski vest under my thin windbreaker for driving in the mountains, I crammed sweaters, heavy socks, underwear, raincoat, whatever, into the saddlebags John had told me to buy and line with plastic garbage bags to waterproof them, tossed the bags over the sides of the luggage carrier, tied more stuff on top of the carrier and even tucked two road atlases and a guidebook into the small basket I'd tacked onto the tiny luggage carrier attached to the front fender. Then I hopped on the cub, kicked it to life and putted off chock full of anticipation.

Brains broiling in merciless July sun, body drenching in sweat mixed with exhaust fumes, arms aching from steering the heavily loaded down cub, almost all of that enthusiasm and anticipation had evaporated by the time I pulled into a gas station two hours later, still hoplessly lost in the noisy congestion and bewildering maze of streets of Kyoto city proper. As the attendant unscrewed the gas cap – hidden under the seat! – stuck the nozzle in and pumped in a whole liter and a half, I asked, “Can you tell me how I can get to Route 367”

The attendant frowned. “Route 367? . . . Oh, You must mean the Ohara Road. Turn left at the third stoplight, then straight ahead. Where are you going?”

“Shirakawa. . . . I hope”

“On that little thing? You be careful!”

Cursing John for assuring me that asking directions was all part of the fun, I had to ask directions three more times before I finally learned it was turn left, cross the bridge! and then straight. But at last I found myself putting up a winding road walled by low mountains.

A tour bus fumed by, damn near crowded me off the road.

“Hey buddy, give me some room!”

Then I spied the yellow button next to the choke lever. Be-beep! So when the next tour bus tried to crowd me off road: BE-BEEEEEP! The petite tour guide at the front of the bus was screaming away on the PA system so the driver couldn't have heard me. But I felt better anyway.

After two more tour buses fumed by plus God knows how many honking cars, I was beginning to wonder why this road was so much more crowded than the ones John had led me on when the mountains on the left side of the road retreated to form a rice-paddy filled, farmhouse-dotted valley. But the right side of the road was crammed with tacky souvenir shops and restaurants and a huge parking lot that the tour buses fumed into and flushed out their hordes of swarming tourists, their petite tour guides armed with bullhorns screaming away at them. SANZENIN read the road sign. I fled past that noise and confusion of a temple complex -- famous for its quiet serenity! -- and sped up into the sanity, I prayed, of the mountains beyond.

No more fuming tour buses no more honking cars I found the road here almost as great as the ones John had taken me on. SHIGA PREFECTURE welcomed a sign at the top of the pass over the mountain chain. The pavement roughened, potholed, and finally turned into hard-packed dirt and gravel that I had to slow down for and worry if the cub would be able to take it without falling apart. But just as John had promised, the cub bounced rattled and wobbled along on it without complaining at all.

But my ass sure did.

Just when I thought I was the only vehicle on the road, two much larger bikes came at me from the opposite direction, their drivers pointing at me just before they passed by.

They know I'm a gaijin?

But as other bikes passed by their drivers also pointing at me, I noticed the smiles on their faces and the V-signs of greeting their fingers formed and I started V-signing back, somehow feeling I was among friends.

By the time the hard-packed gravel and dirt of that very minor highway finally merged with a more major paved one, my ass and arms were killing me. I started looking for the Japanese style B&Bs called minshuku that John had told me were a lot cheaper than Japanese-style ryokan inns and found one edging the highway.

It was real cheap all right but my tiny two-tatami-mat room was littered with girly comic books, the vodka-like shochu the other two guests poured me as we ate our sparse dinner in the tattered kitchen coarse. Their truck-driver Japanese even coarser but jovial.

Submitted: November 07, 2018

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

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B Douglas Slack

Myself and two other friendas got conned into staying at a minshuku one night. Never again. I ended up with two leftover family kids in the two-mat room when I woke up. I found out later, the father had simply tossed his kids out so he could charge me for the room. I'm not sure what other room my friends shared.

Bill

Wed, November 7th, 2018 9:36pm