Onomichi is a teensy city on Japan’s main island, connected to its smallest-of-four main islands (Shikoku) by enormous bridges spanning a rippling pool of tiny island blops. This path, from Onomichi to Shikoku, is the route of a famous bicycle trip called Shimanami Kaido.⁰¹

Castle spotted on the train heading into Onomichi.

Onomichi itself had working port vibes. Yellowing infrastructure, blue collar folks, a rickety local train that passed through, and a tenuous stair-filled walking path to navigate up through the old town. Cheap chain restaurants sat squirreled away from the city center in on modern developed pockets, by a big department store or hotel or pachinko parlor. A choice few gleaming waterside dining spots seemed to have only recently emerged due to the town’s growing attraction as the famous bicycle route’s kickoff.

Curry/rice chain restaurant we ate at down the road from our hotel. To give you a sense, that ¥397 beer is $2.49 at current exchange rate. Filling combo meals were around $7-$9, including tax, no tipping. I adore this stuff.

Evening local train slicing through town.

And the bicycles. Oh yes, there were bicycles.

The Bicycles#

Planning this section remotely was one of those tiny travel agonies, where you’re trying to piece together some exact critical details from sparse websites and blogs.

The original goal: ride the trail. In one day, cross all these bridges and islands, from Onomichi to Imabari, the town just on the other side of the water and right on the tip of Shikoku (Japan’s smallest of four main islands). Forward our luggage from the starting hotel to the destination, using the apparently ubiquitous lugging forwarding service.⁰²

To give you a sense of the route (top-right to bottom-left).

The catch:

1. There might not be bicycles. This seemed ludicrous from the photos. Parking lots filled with thousands of bicycles. But apparently they do run out, and you can’t reserve them. So we might arrive and have our whole plan foiled.

2. The route is long. 43-50 miles. Though Julie can now ride without incident, she’s still not exactly a speed demon. This is a considerable distance for a novice, especially if there are hills involved (there were).

3. You can reserve bicycles, including e-bikes. Problems 1 and 2 solved, right? The catch was one of two problems, or both (at this point I can’t remember which). Either (a) we couldn’t reserve pick-up and drop-off at different locations (e.g., pickup at the start, dropoff at the end), because the shop simply didn’t have offices on both sides. And biking there and back would have been too much, even across two days. Or (b), I was still concerned about the distance, even with an e-bike. Julie doesn’t exactly love speed (rightfully so), so she wasn’t going to be maxing out the e-bike’s potential.

I eventually decided, let’s just reserve bikes, ride however far we want, and then ride back.⁰³ It better fit our general vibe: we’re not trying to do things quickly, accomplish any feats or conquer any routes. We’re kind of always in stop and look at interesting stuff mode.⁰⁴

For what it’s worth, if you go: there were plenty of bikes. (This was early May.) The parking lots in Onomichi sat happily jammed with thousands unused.

The ride itself was absolutely gorgeous. It starts out in a funny way: with a tiny ferry ride! If you notice, Onomichi is cut in half through the middle by water. So if you’re on the mainland side, you hop on a little boat with your bike to kick off the island ride.

The trail is exceedingly well-marked. There are dedicated bike lanes—sometimes whole tiers—even on all the enormous bridges. The many tiny islands constantly afford ever-refreshing coastal vistas. On the interiors, you ride past farmers with small organized plots and greenhouses, little towns with ancient blackened houses, and marshy canals. We passed industrial warehouses, where peaking inside, we saw workers all performing warm-up stretches together in union. Construction abounded, contrasting with what otherwise felt like humans doing their damndest to keep decay as slow as possible.

Do the buildings feel like extra rectangular to you somehow?

Riding on these small islands and seeing how much agriculture there was really gave a sense of like, every square inch being used somehow.

Tetrapods, yet again.

The enormous bridges, often with an entire separate layer for Bicycles to ride on, stand in extra contrast to the humble infrastructure of the towns they link.

For many outdoor activities in the USA, you must generally venture away from the nurturing support of civilization, like flushing toilets and sandwiches wrapped in plastic. Not so here. Plenty of spots to hydrate and caffeinate and sunscreen-enate.

Oh also, there were Tears of the Kingdom ads everywhere at Lawsons (one of three major convenience store brands). At this one, I took the opportunity to buy some glucose goo to fuel my pedaling.

On the ride, I had a tiny tragedy where I flipped off my bike and ate pavement. A bee flew into my shirt. The experience gave me much more sympathy for characters in movies where a tiny stupid incident leads to their death. Because, like, what should one do here, rationally? Slow down quickly but in a controlled manner, then remove the shirt. What did I do? Well, I started trying to flail my shirt around with one hand. When this didn’t work, I instinctively tried flailing the shirt with both hands, which caused the handlebar to go nuts and me to fly off.

Thankfully, there was a blissful respite of traffic when this all happened, so nobody saw my nose dive or frantic shirtless dance just after. And convenience stores had enough bandages etc. we could patch me up no problem. The bike was fine. But I was worried them seeing me battered up would cause a careful bike inspection and potentially some enormous fee. I hid my bandages when we returned the bikes. Made it through everything except until the very end when we walked away, I couldn’t help myself but wave goodbye. I could have sworn I saw a flicker of recognition on the guy’s face, seeing my palms covered in plasters. But we kept walking. (The bike was fine. Really!)

Of course I have a million more photos of the ride, but they all look about the same: small towns, spotted nature, islands, bridges. One of those experiences which doesn’t photograph well, but gosh, a good bicycle ride in a beautiful place on a pleasant weather day? Hard to beat.

Back in Town#

We made it back to Onomichi in the evening with enough time to investigate a concrete overlook atop the hill in town that I can only best describe as it would also make complete sense if it didn’t exist, but was cool that it did.

Something I learned only recently is that Japan is 68% covered in forest. Compare to USA (34%) or Brazil (59%).

Even better, we got to check out more liminal spaces. We walked through a park on the way back, which emptied out into a totally abandoned community pool. I was thrilled. Would it start back up in the summer, or was it permanently abandoned? No idea.

The next day, we grabbed some sustenance near the train station as dozens of cyclists circled around awkwardly in their clip-ons, like dogs wearing shoes. Despite the logistics and the bee/pavement incident, I’d come again in a heartbeat.⁰⁵

Footnotes

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1. I feel compelled to translate words and phrases like these for you, but I honestly rarely did while there (the sheer volume of names so high, the translations often not really illustrating much), so I’m just going to let them slide. ↩︎

2. If you’ve been to Japan, you’ve probably seen the trucks with this logo and not realized it, like us: yellow oval, black mother cat holding baby cat in its mouth. ↩︎

3. I will admit, this is one case where I wish reservations weren’t so necessary, just in travel in general. I wished that we had only small bags, that there was always room in hostels to rely on, and that we could just go wherever we wanted in a day and trust there’d be a roof to sleep under that night. Maybe the only true insurance here is being willing to find somewhere to camp. ↩︎

4. For me, this is stop and take pictures of interesting things, and for Julie it’s oh my god why is Max stopping again. ↩︎

5. Thank you Riley and Tristan for the recommendation! ↩︎