Oh, Gravity

I wonder what real bike touring enthusiasts would think of the route I planned—Sunday larf or masochist's delight? Well, like I said before, beauty and a challenge were my goals and luckily the two go hand in hand around Kyushu, with its propensity for swift and brutal elevation change around the mostly mountainous northeast/middle. But most Oita JETs don't know this and the first half of the first day was deceptively undemanding. Oh my, if they only knew...

We started the day from the Nanasegawa Nature Park in Oita City, a lovely little oasis of riverside delight surrounded by shopping malls, big-box stores, chain restaurants and used car lots. If the area didn't have a Starbucks at Wasada Town and that burger shack owned by a lunatic then I'd never visit this part of town for anything else. As expected, the group started an hour late and even then some stragglers were still showing up, but such is the way with the herding of cats (who ride bikes). We rode south to where the Ono River begins to enter the hilly surrounding towns south of the city before turning west on the mostly flat route 57. This road meanders through farmland and past a lot of green nothing, but sometimes that's precisely what hits the spot, particularly when the mercury's passing twenty-degrees and the sky is a gorgeous shade of blue. Sometimes things just come together right.

I stopped for a 45-minute lunch at a michi no eki and rode the junk food express with stopovers in Fried Chickensville and Bluberry Fro-Yoburg. Little did I know that Owen, the man I'd given (in a very kind gesture he tipped me 2000-yen afterwards) my refurbished Giant hybrid to, had passed me while I enjoyed a banana. That man is a machine, I swear. His philosophy in these matters is to push as far as possible without stopping and I don't think he took more than a 5-minute food stop as his “lunch” any of the three days. Still, I caught him after a few kilometers, but didn't manage to shake him until the big uphill into Kuju. By that point I didn't want to shake him though. It's such a rare occasion when I meet JETs that I can stand without having to resort to alcohol, let alone ones I actually like on the merits of their personality. Geez, how much of a jackass does that make me sound like? Also, he was riding a bike that up until two days previous had been my bike and I felt a halo of pride hovering about that of the two lead bikes one I was riding and the other I used to ride...before leaving it out in the rain and snow for a year and letting it rust to a fine crap brown (Crayola, I'm sure you have your best men on making that color?) and then spending two weeks to get it back to tip-top condition. Anyways, we finished together.

Our lodging for the night was awesome for several reasons, the primary being that the campground's boundary backed up just about to the foot of the Kuju Mountain Range in all its splendor. The cabins were also impressively spacious and well-stocked, even coming with—gasp!—built-in heaters. But before checking in, indeed before even seeing the cabins, what most impressed me was the cafe truck parked in the lot open for business and the soft serve ice cream shack on the side of it with the always tantalizing kurogoma (black sesame) flavor. I opted for a iced cafe au lait at the roach coach and found the woman to be shockingly serious about her cuppa joe. Not only did I get a pre-prep battery of questions, she also stringently advised me about how to drink the dual-layered beverage afterwards. “Stir it before drinking to properly mix the milk and coffee.” I did as told, but it wasn't good enough for the coffee lady—I'm guessing nothing in life ever is for her. “Stir it more!” she loudly counseled and with an accompanying wild invisible cup and spoon gesture. The hassle finally did have its pay-off. That was a damn fine cup of coffee.

The remains of the day weren't without issue entirely, however. After I checked us in the management informed me that they had overbooked the campground's cabins by about twenty people for the night and since we were the single largest party the futons would be coming out of our supply. We were comped a bit, but I don't think it was twenty-people-sleeping-on-hardwood-floor's worth. Drama reared its ugly head after dinner as well when it was discovered two volunteers in their support car split off the route for about an hour for parts unknown and left riders in that section without help. They were tongue-lashed so severely by the volunteer coordinator that one went home then and there. It's a circus out here, folks.

I woke up early on Saturday and immediately sprung into action in what was to become my somewhat-begrudging role of Tour Bike Mechanic. As the bringer of “The Crate” (a milk crate filled with my own bike tools, chemicals, rags and spare parts) I instantaneously became that guy who will fix your bike when you've finally ridden it into the ground. I recently read a great article written a few years back from National Geographic Adventures about an explorer who set out with two Inuit men to take a look see around Baffin Island only to have their outboard motor fail too far out to paddle back. They found an island and spent a few days taking the engine apart and putting it back together several times before finally sealing the fuel line with kelp. Kelp. I felt similarly. One rider had an exploded tube and tire along the way (the tire walls had literally exploded out) that he was able to replace himself (with my $50 Vittoria kevlar road race tire—one of the best in the world), but somehow he had lost his axle and the bike had to be tossed in a car for my inspection later. Well, I found him an axle that would work, the problem being that it was on another bike. So I stole the entire wheel from one completely beyond help bike, put it on the second bike with a workable axle, stole that axle and put it on the first bike with my horribly expensive tire. Got all that? This kind of parts juggling act, not to mention seat and brake adjustments, chain work and gear inspections went on until the end of the trip.

Due to repairing bikes I was late getting on the road, but that didn't matter much since I'd passed everyone after about 10km/45 minutes. I did enjoy riding with Mike, a genuinely nice guy and excellent rider who works at the Oita International Plaza, but at some point after the topiary sculpture place (tens of them, lined up and of varying sizes) I turned around and he was gone. It wasn't too long after that interesting landmark that we all ran into a rather frightening impediment to our ride.

Controlled field burning (noyaki in Japanese) is a fairly common practice around this time of year, just prior to planting season. When we saw smoke rising from the direction our route would take us I don't think many of us thought it was anything but farmers readying their plots for the annual hot dog tree planting frenzy. To the left and right for many many kilometers one could feel the heat from barn-sized walls of flame licking your sweaty skin, some as far as a hundred meters away, some as close as the road shoulder (I put my outstretched foot through some flame, it was that close). And the ash...how it blinded the eyes and stuck to everything. A day after the ride ended ride participants received an email from Ryan, the ride coordinator, saying the thing we rode through wasn't noyaki, it was a full-fledged out of control grass fire! How were we allowed to ride through it without the road being closed? Why were people allowed to park on the side of the road, meters from flames, to film the spectacle? Why were there no fire trucks on the scene, the only suppression response I saw consisting of elderly men an women with back-mounted water sacks and bamboo rakes? Madness, I tell you.

Powering through Oguni, past Tsuetate Onsen and into Oyama before hitting Hita I was definitely making fantastic time, but a well-timed flat in town had me stopping off at Oharaya, a restaurant owned by my friends Luchi and Eriko, for lunch. Fixing the flat and enjoying lunch took the better part of an hour and I was resigned to losing my top spot, but just outside of town I caught Owen finishing up one of his power lunches at a Lawson and we rode on together. The final 10km of the day was almost entirely uphill and much steeper than the long slope from the previous day. Unlike that one though, this slope between Hita and our goal in Yamakuni contained absolutely no flat respites and after a while it really seemed like it would never end. Spotting the love hotel and tunnel at the top of the pass was one of the best endorphin rushes I've felt in quite some time. It was all downhill from here to the cabins—a flat-out bomb that would end up costing me dearly.

I tucked into my “aerodynamic” riding position (as aero as you can make a brick like me) and shot past Owen down the hill. Gravity kills, as they say, but now slipping its surly bonds after that climb I was grateful for its embrace. Tucked in I passed a Porsche. Occasionally I'll put my head down to check...I don't know...something on my bike that I think will fly off at these speeds, and it was with my head down that my bike leaped a foot in the air and my rear tire exploded with a report like a gunshot. Slowly apply brake, keep bars straight. Don't panic. Owen arrives and I'm checking everything over: Both my rims are bent and the braking surface distended, the result of impacting a fist-sized rock at, oh, 70kph. As my bike's revenge the rock got split in two, at least. What's worse is that I have to call a support car to take my unridable bike and I the final two kilometers to the goal. Humiliating.

The stock Shimano WH-500 wheels that came with my Cervelo aren't anything special, but I wasn't planning on replacing them. This is going to cost me at least a couple hundred bucks for some new wheels, probably some cheap Fulcrum Racing 7s in red. Well, I do like red.

Just thinking about shelling out more cash than I already am in my daily life is boiling my blood, so I'm going to end this already-too-long post here for the day. Tune in tomorrow to find out if I get back on the road for the final day.

--Matt