Honshū Here We Go

I really have to recommend the Freaks Internet Cafe chain. Very comfortable places with "all you can drink" to an extensive soft drinks bar included to addmission fee. This particular Freaks cafe is at Hachinohe, norht Honshu.

I arrived to Aomori a couple of days ago, stayed there for the night and a second night due to rain. Then I set of towards the coast/south down the route 103 in a blasting heat, then in a absolute downpour of water and massive winds. It took a couple of days to cross the mountain range to Misawa. I really oughta make a route map at sometime, here`s basically how it went down. Route 103, Route 40 (absolute murder that road), route 394, route 22, and route 165. Then to Misawa via road 8 (that sucked too) and after spending the night there I set on the route 45 out towards Kuji, 60 something kilometers to south.

The morals are high now as the weather is fair and I have reached the nice, smooth, spacious, and foremostly FLAT(ish) coastal roads. Concerning mountains... You might remember what Samuel L Jackson had to say about snakes on his plane.... Enough Is Enough... Srsly, it was really hard work walking up those mountains in rain and even harder in sun. The roads are very narrow and curvy. Allthough that sounds fun, it isn`t that nice when there are cars going around with you. First you climb up for two days and then spend one day going down leaving behind a trail of your shoesole on fire, blasting like a bat out of hell and trying desperatedly not to wind up as meatloaf on the grill of a oncoming truck. Seriously fun roads to hit at the quiet hours of morning, without a backpack tho.

Speaking of early mornings, the day before yesterday saw me leaving my campsite in hurry at 5 am. It seemed like a good idea to hide from the onslaught of heavy rain and passersby under a small bridge at the mountains. There was even a small trickle of water running under it in which I thought I might take a bath in the morning if it were sunny. Well, I allmost did take a bath in it because the rain kept on coming down hard the whole night and I woke up to find that the small trickle was now a raging torrent on muddy water about 10cm from my tent doorway. I am truly sorry I didn`t take a picture of the scene, because it was epic. Too bad my first thought was "I have to get my stuff outta here" rather than "Damn, it`ll be a kickass picture when all my stuff gets floated down the river". Luckily I keep my campsites tidy, so nothing else was lost to the water except a pair of boxers, a t shirt and my Gorillapod. The clothes were set out to dry and I had forgotten the tripod on a rock when contemplating a photo of me bathing. Hope they find their way to somewhere nice. At least I had a nice early start.

Otherwise, I have become totally oblivious to the passing of time. I was genuinely surprised yesterday when I realised it was sunday. Had someone asked me the time or the date, my best guess would`ve been "Umm, maybe July?". Same goes with the time. I usually wake up when it`s light, head out, skate untill it gets dark, eat and go to my tent. So it`s basically two times in a day, light and dark. A very pleasurable way of life, I could get used to this.

Other thoughts so far.

The Osprey backpack is worrying me, I doubted the starps from the beginning, and now they are slowly coming undone. The problem is that the buckles are loose and akward and the starps curl around them and chaff down. I`ll have to figure out something to counter this soon.

The Jack Wolfskin tent has been awesome, it has been very breathing and comfortable in the heat and lasted a few very hard storms. But the bag it`s packed into isn`t. It sucks. It`s very fragile, smallest scrape to a say tunnel wall and it tears. And the shutter system, while wery cunningly designed, just doesn`t work. Stuff keeps falling out. Just today I`d have lost my tent sticks if my iPod had been working. Fortunately(?) it still isn`t and I herd the noise when the the sticks hit the ground. I have now secured the tent bag with a lenght of string and hope it stays togehter.

First signs of shinsplits yesterday, due to walking so much with my other shoe being far more worn out than the other. No worries if the skating stays good.

The Pocari Sweat sports drink doesn`t keep you best. I had awfull cramps all over my body yesterday, due to the lack of salt in my body, caused by intense sweating. Those sports drinks aren`t doing their job. Luckily, salted and dried fish and beef jerky are widely awailable as are salted nuts. I`ve changed back to drinking mostly water and eating salty stuff to counteract the effects of sweating.

Japanese people are very friendly but do not speak english much... at all. I have gotten so bored with the engrish that I barely even notice it anymore.


I`ll better get going now, I`m aiming for Kuji today!