mo vs. the volcanoes

we are in the town of kagoshima. it's on the south end of kyushu. we came here because i heard there were some volcanoes and i was intrigued so ryan and i agreed to come down here (it wasn't too far from fukuoka). Anyway, there's an island (sakurajima) here just across from the city that consists of three volcanoes. on a clear day you can see them, smoke coming out and floating over the city here. it's pretty cool.

anyway, today we went over to the island. the forecast called for a little rain but given our tight schedule we stuck with our original plan. we went over, rented some bikes and did the 'grand tour'. now before going on about the grand tour, let me tell you that my aquila prima (my road bike) and my norco sasquatch (my cross country bike) would be jealous of the beast i was riding today. weighing almost as much as me (ok, maybe it was more like 45lbs - this thing weighed more than my sister Michelle's bike), sporting a weirdo rear brake which was more like a poor man's version of a disk brake (the rear brake did not make me confident that i'd be able to stop in normal conditions), and of course a single gear. I was somewhat excited because of this single gear business - a taste of the fixie without the pain of having to ride without brakes (other than your feet - i've actually been drooling over some fixies lately... the perfect piece of cycling engineering - light, simple and very dangerous). We hopped on and started riding... what should've been a 2.5　hour ride quickly turned into a 5 hour ordeal. On any normal bike, this ride should've been easy... but now that i'm on the other side of this adventure i realize that we should've really been riding bikes with proper gears and given the weather, probably not riding at all.

the first part of the ride was pretty good but quickly got hillier and hillier as we got to the south of the island. we got halfway and decided to have lunch. this is when it started raining somewhat heavily. we waited a while and then decided to ride with our raincoats (the man who rented the bikes gave us raincoats)... the only problem is that there wasn't a proper lane for bikes so we were in traffic, in pouring rain, riding bikes with questionable brakes only being able to see half of the time because rain was falling in our eyes. beyond this though, every now and again we'd hit a hill that was just impossible for the bike to go up - it just wouldn't go!! At about the 3/4 mark we pulled over to have a snack. as prepared as i was i made some gatorade (i'm happy i threw that in my bag at the last moment!) and we ate some apricots that our bike renter man had also given us (he was giving us stuff left and right... i think we were his only customers today).

it started raining even more at this point so we sat for a bit in a bus shelter and waited part of it out. i looked at a map and decided that we were probably not that far away at this point (none of the maps were very useful - most of them were not to scale or didn't have enough detail). We got back on and rode... up and down some more hills. Finally we hit a straight-away and things were looking up... when... all of a sudden a truck is coming towards us and we see our bike rental man hanging out the window waving at us and screaming something at us. We smiled and kept riding on. At this point he did a u-turn and came to offer us a ride back to the ferry - there were 5 kilometres left to ride. being so close we declined but thanked him and he drove off.... i can't help but wonder what he was thinking and if it's normal for him to go searching for his clients? We'd told him we were riding around the island so i guess he kind of knew what to expect.

Anyway, some 15 minutes later we arrived at his shop. Soaked. Tired. Bruised from the massive seat. Don't get me wrong... It was fun. i love riding. i love bikes... and the views were amazing... i wouldn't really recommend doing it on a rainy day though. the volcanoes were pretty much impossible to see because of the clouds and really, the ride was pretty tough given the bikes we were on. I'm not exactly sure just how far we rode today. There seem to be some differing numbers as to how long the ride is depending on who you ask. I read somewhere that it was 32 kms. I don't think that was right. I also read somewhere else that it's 52. That seems a little high. We asked our renter how far it was and he said 40kms which sounds about right but who knows....