In Italy we say that “all the street lead to Rome”. If that’s true, than we can say all the streets lead to Tokyo, in this part of the world.
Right after leaving Nagoya, we started traveling towards Omaezaki, where another of our university ex-classmate was waiting for us.
The first day, having left Nagoya pretty late in the day, we couldn’t cycle too far. A little over 50km after, we found a sweet spot for our tent at sunset, right in the middle of nowhere, and simply called it a day.
In the morning, we were fresh as new (we had JUST 11 hours of sleep, after all :) ). We decided to beat our personal record and cycle the 107km to Omaezaki before in one take.
Toyokawa's Castle
Iwata
Surprisingly, by 5pm we had already arrived in Omaezaki and met Martina, with whom we had an awesome night out, big time celebrating our new record and the fact that the three of us were again together after so many years! We headed back to Martina’s place at 5am after a night of karaoke with strangers, heavy drinking and lots, LOTS of laughs.
The next day we woke up, had a nice breakfast, packed our Specialized Tricross with all our gear, gave a hug goodbye to our wonderful friend and left… or did we?
Well, we would have if Sio didn’t realize he had forgotten his helmet in Martina’s house right after she had left for work!
We decided to then wait for her to get back home after work in the evening and spent the day in a cafe writing blogs, editing photos and working on the vlogs.
After spending yet another night at Martina’s house, we left early in the morning with the missing helmet and cycled (not without problems, stupid japanese bike signs!) to Shizuoka where, in our best style, we placed the tent in the castle’s imperial park because… why the hell not!
The view from our tent in Shizuoka
The following day, while eating breakfast at a convenience store, for the first time we sat down and actually planned the route for the day. At that point we had already lost any kind of hope in climbing mt.Fuji (apparently there’s snow at the top until the end of July and it’s highly advised not to climb it unless you’re an experience climber) and we wanted to make sure to at least end up in a location with a great view of such an iconic place of Japan. After scouting the web for a bit, we realized that the best possible view of the Fuji you can have is from the lake Ashi, in Hakone.
“Awesome, it’s not even 90km away! We can get there before night!” and we straight away started cycling.
The first 70km literally flew by and we started believing we could get there for the sunset.
Well, there’s one little detail we didn’t account for: the lake Ashi is a VOLCANIC lake. From the map we couldn’t realize that so we were kind of surprised when we started climbing on this ridiculously steep road that brought us to the top. in less than 15 km, we went from sea level to 900mt of altitude. Obviously we didn’t make it for the sunset, we barely made it before it got dark. Destroyed and tired to the bone after the hardest climb of the whole travel, we ate something and literally passed out in our tend, that we conveniently placed in the bushes near a parking lot.
Clouds over Mt.Fuji
A small temple on the way to the Vulcano
A small temple on the way to the Vulcano
A small temple on the way to the Vulcano
A small temple on the way to the Vulcano
The moment we arrived on lake Ashi, at the top of the mountain.
Early in the morning we got woken up by the parking space guardians, that were obviously very surprised by finding a tent and two big italian boys in their parking space! After the necessary apologies, they showed us a path to get to the lookout on lake ashi, from where we had this incredible view of Mt.Fuji. Yup, worth it!
View of Mt.Fuji from lake Ashi
View of Mt.Fuji from lake Ashi
The park on lake Ashi
After having finally seen Mt.Fuji, we went back to our bicycles, said goodbye to our “new friends” and left, headed to Tokyo, pretty much at the speed of light! Why at the speed of light?
Well, you know, the previous day we put our sweat and blood into climbing those almost 1000 mt of altitude in less than 15km so now we had a long and steep slope in front of us! We barely touched the pedals for the next 20km! And, oh man, the landscapes we found on the way! Incredible!
A suspended rail track in the mountains
By the end of the day, we reached Atsugi, in the extreme periphery of tokyo, where a very important meeting the next day was awaiting us…
The travel goes on..
