Day Ten: Tires Blown and Muroto!, Temples 22 – 23
Weather: Rain, sun, rain, sun, rain, sun, rain…
Today I rode down and out of the mountains towards the sea, then south along the coast down to the tip of Muroto, stopping for the night about 2 kilometres away from temple 24. The hotel manager was very nice; he gave me a great breakfast and a bath towel as I was leaving! I was touched.
Temple 22, Byodoji, was about 6 km. south of Emoto where I was staying. The photo at the top of this post is of the ceiling of the main temple there.
Yakuoji is a twenty kilometre ride south in a small town called Hiwasa, along the ocean. It's a seventy five kilometre ride to temple 24 from here, though, so I moved out smartly.
Yakuoji, temple 23.
I blew my back tire out at about 2:30 in a place called Shishikui; it had been wobbling and behaving increasingly badly all morning, but, though I looked, I had seen no bike shops. I now took the bike across the road to a parking lot near a coffee shop, an eccentric modernist structure, and tried to fix the tire. The strains of karaoke drifted out the door. Realising I could ride no further, I went into the shop and asked the manageress where I might find a bike shop. She helpfully pointed out, then drew a map to a place just a block away! Lucky, lucky…
The bike guy was there, and put a 28 cm. tire (all he had) on the front rim, moving the 35mm tire to the back. I thanked him and headed off. The bike felt good, solid again, and the front tire was responsive. He was a cool guy, had another Bridgestone road bike of the same basic model as mine (mine was modified), and was able to tell me how old mine was. It was only six years old (I thought it was about ten to fifteen).
I love ocean views, and there are wonderful ones down this peninsula. Encountered a bad headwind for the last 30 kilometres though. The weather was windy, rainy, gusting. The landscape is powerful, but somehow brooding, a little somber. I lived on Haida Gwai, the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, for two years, and in some ways this landscape had the same wild energy as that place.
I stopped at a hotel near a giant statue of Kukai, just south of Sea World, probably about two kilometres away from the tip of the peninsula. This was the most expensive hotel room yet, at about 9500 yen ($95), though it included dinner and breakfast, a good thing as I had not seen a combini for miles, and there was nothing much else around. Most restaurants and houses seemed abandoned or closed up. People I passed on the street seemed shy, or a bit sour. I got the feeling Muroto was a bit depressed, perhaps feeling hard times due to the recent recession.
I wore my dirty bike clothes to dinner as I wasn’t sure if I could wear my yukata to the restaurant. I had plenty of time to feel silly, as I sat in my soaked shoes and dirty clothes, watching the handful of other guests, dry, comfortable, and enjoying themselves.
Dinner was Japanese style, sashimi, miso, tataki (seared bonito), and one of those whole, six or seven inch long fish (I ate it, of course). There was also a bowl of oden, bubbling away in a spirit heater. Yum!
My room overlooked the water, and I fell asleep listening to the wind and waves crashing on the rocks 30 metres away.
