And BOOM, just like that, we had left Svalbard and all its polar bears behind, and jumped on a plane towards Iceland, for the much anticipated two wheeled part of our project. Cycling all of Iceland on our trusted Cinelli Hobootleg Geo bikes.
But first : a little stop over in Oslo. And with little, I mean SIXTEEN HOURS.
After a handful of hours on the ferry, along with our new traveling companions met in Aomori, we heard a voice coming out of the speakers : “We’re about to land in Hakodate, prepare yourself to leave the ferry”
Woah! We were both speechless for a second there. We had just made our way back to Hokkaido, where the both of us had lived for 2 years each. But this time, we had arrived on our own forces, and on a bike!
Arriving to Niigata came with a real lot of excitement: we had finally made it to the other side of Japan, crossed the Japanese alps and we were damn ready to enjoy the city for a couple of rest days. Too bad, thought, that all of that enthusiasm hit a brick wall straight away: long story short, there’s nothing to do in Niigata. NOTHING at all.
We reached the centre of the city around sunset and we went through our usual we-made-it-back-to-civilization routine : hot springs, coin laundry, food and looking for a place to pitch the tent. It was pissing rain, it was late, it’s was dark. As in : real dark. So we just decided to completely rely on google maps and blindly followed a strangely curvy road until we found a square literally the size of our tend under a tree, and stopped there, completely disregarding the fact that there was a peacock in a cage, literally a few steps form us.
After spending 6 days in Tokyo, doing everything a tourist wouldn’t do, (and unwillingly avoiding every single thing a tourist WOULD do) we jumped back on our specializedTricross bikes and started cycling towards the Japanese alps and the city behind them, Niigata.
With little to no surprise, we left Tokyo relatively late and the first day flew by too damn quickly: traffic, street lights, last purchases for the trip and more then 50km before even finding ourselves outside of that urban jungle.
As soon as we reached the first little village outside of the suburbs of Tokyo, we pitched the tent and went to sleep super early.
