DAY OF MIXED EMOTIONS

I woke up early and had some time to just lounge around until check out time. I was pretty beat so I was looking forward to the rest time in Niigata. I was also excited to meet another touring guy named Paul that I’ve been talking to for some time now via e-mail and such. He started in Tokyo and was heading all the way up to Niigata via the mountain pass route. As I was leaving, my dad told me some bad news about a very close family friend who has been overcome with cancer. He doesn’t have much time left and I had mixed emotions about it all…why am I here and not back home, will I be able to see him one last time? Isn’t it more important to be with him than to ride a bicycle around Japan? What I’m doing seems so pointless when you compare it to the situation at hand. But then I tell myself that he would’ve wanted me to keep going, to enjoy this moment. Is that just a selfish self-fulfilling reason to satisfy my guilt? I don’t know the answer, and there is no real answer to it all…

I felt out of it and depressed for a while, but eventually I was convinced that he would’ve wanted me to do this. I hope I am right. I was really broke at this point, broke in the sense that I had no more Japanese yen…I needed to exchange dollars if I wanted more. I settled for 2 margarine/jam filled French bread rolls they have at conbini’s for 100 yen. I ate one right away, and saved the other one for later. I rode along the main route for a bit until it got closer to the coast and then proceeded to head back on the coastal highway. Along the way, I passed right by the nuclear facility in Kashiwazaki.

The coastal road was full of bikers and people enjoying the beautiful Sunday weather. There were several guys trying to surf what waves they could find, and people fishing and hunting for sea urchins or something.The trash reappeared again along the beach. Not a pleasant sight, but I tried to look past it all. There were some road side rest areas I passed serving seafood and such but I had no money for that sort of thing. I ate my last French bread roll and some chocolate I had left over from the previous day. It started getting more isolated and even the conbini’s were disappearing. There was one more rest area at about the halfway point but it was full of people…I kept going hoping to find one less crowded. Further up the road, I did find one but it seemed to be closed. The road started heading up and over a hill so I had to face the tunnels once again…after surviving that mess, I found another small village with a tiny shop that had barely anything stocked inside. Luckily they had 3 onigiri rice balls so I bought them all and woofed them down in a jiffy on the sand right in front of the ocean.

I kept riding but felt that I wasn’t making much progress. There were several long stretches of road through sparse pine tree forests and rolling hills. Eventually it flattens out and becomes a boring straight road towards the city. I’ve noticed more road cyclists around this area, seems like it’s popular around here. By the time I headed into the city the wind was getting cold. The city is big but the traffic is definitely not as crowded as the bigger cities. Everything else is the same though, standard places of business and such. I found the guest house I was going to be staying at but had a bit of a hard time finding it. It’s located on the ninth floor of an office building. I went to the top but the owner wasn’t there. Right at the same time, another guy arrived and so we got together and called the owner. He said just find some beds and relax until he gets there. We were a bit suspicious at first, but a lady that stayed there the night before said he was a nice guy.

I went ahead and started doing laundry and took a shower. I hung around and talked to Tamura-san from Nagoya. He came via overnight bus for 4000 yen. Not a bad deal at all. He looked tired and said he didn’t sleep much on the way over. The owner finally arrived and we talked to him for a bit. Since I was broke I decided to cook some spaghetti I’ve had stashed for several days. Tamura-san left to hunt down some cheap food, he was also a budget traveler. After he left, the owner and I talked for a while about Niigata and about life in Japan. He said it’s a lonely life in Niigata because it’s the backside of Japan that gets overlooked, and it gets very cold. We talked for a long time, and he kept drinking and drinking. By midnight he was a goner and went off somewhere to sleep.

In between all this, I was e-mailing Paul to see where he was staying. It seemed like he was right down the street from me. After everyone left I stayed up for a while by myself, thinking about all kinds of things…I wrote an e-mail to my dad to have him give to his friend. How do you write someone a final farewell letter? It took me a while to write something down, and I wasn’t satisfied with it but I figured nothing is ever going to make me satisfied. I went to the conbini down the street and bought some pudding and chips as a late night snack. I finally got really tired and decided to hit the sack.