As with my ski trip to Hokkaido a couple years ago, I was grateful for Keiichi’s help in planning this bicycle tour in Kyushu. He lives in Kagoshima now, and I was looking forward to visiting him there. However, with our detour to Usuki and the days spent there at the bamboo lantern festival, Ferda and I ran out of time. Being a fair bit out of our way we ended up skipping Kagoshima. Thank you, Keiichi, for all the help and sorry that we weren’t able to get together.
Our crossing from Kumamoto to Miyazaki Prefecture was through the scariest tunnel of the trip. As I mentioned in my last post, we hadn’t planned on crossing those mountains on such a busy highway, but the little road we wanted didn’t go through. The 1800m long tunnel was pretty narrow. We started the tunnel on the very narrow sidewalk with quite a high curb. I keep hitting the periodic reflectors with my right front bag (we were riding on the left as always in Japan), scared that I’d lose balance and crash into the highway. I had to stop part way through to calm my nerves. It was good timing as a fast truck zoomed by followed by the typical swirling wind. When the road started obviously going downhill, I got off the sidewalk and sped the rest of the way through the tunnel with no vehicles passing me. We rested in the sun on the other end, again needing to calm down.
The rest of our days in Japan were characterized by the wonderful people we met. We coasted down to Yoshimatsu, and an outgoing woman on a bicycle with two kids and good English gave us a short tour of the sites in her neighborhood: a spring and a shrine.
