Welcome to Nowhere

When you think of Japan, you think crowded super-dense cities, right? That seems to be generally true, but all that density means that it's still pretty easy to find yourself out in the boonies in this postage-stamp country of 150 million.

Sometimes I ride in a straight line into the mountains until I get confused. Here's some pictures from one such ride. Cue dueling banjos.


This is some forgotten old road or hiking trail or jeep trail. I'm not sure what it is, but I've only seen one other person in the half dozen times I've ridden it. And he said I had pretty lips. Anyway, there's some weird radar tower looking thing in the distance, and I'll try to get there at some point and take better pictures. What is it? Why is it in the middle of nowhere?




I don't know why this big slope has been cleared out of all the brush and trees and things, but there you have it. To the mind of a 23-year-old male, a long uninterrupted grass slope is just screaming for you to do something really stupid and hurt yourself on it. Still trying to think of what that might be. Sledding? Slip n' slide?



This looked like a friendly and symmetrical stretch of singletrack, which it was at first. Then all of a sudden it dropped off into a boulder-filled straight-down descent into the foresty bowels of some godforsaken troll's lair. It was absolutely unrideable. This is what I hate about mountain-biking in Japan. You need a road bike to get up, and a DH bike going the other way.