{"id":893,"date":"2026-09-26T11:44:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T11:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/?p=893"},"modified":"2026-09-28T10:08:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T10:08:55","slug":"silver-week-2026-day-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/2026\/09\/26\/silver-week-2026-day-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Silver Week 2026 \u2013 Day 9"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Ryusendo (Iwata) to Zao<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Weather:<\/strong> heavy clouds all day with some showers. 15C in the morning, with a high of 21C during the day but mostly cooler.
Distance:<\/strong> ~400km<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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<< Previous Day<\/a> | Next Day >><\/a> | Photo Album<\/a> | Video<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Today was a day of mostly following the 45 along the east coast..<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Woke up later around 6:30, then had a huge breakfast and was finally ready to leave by around 8am. It was pretty fresh heading off to the coast, where I picked up the start of the 45. The GPS kept trying to push me onto the E45, but what’s the point of a motorcycle tour if you just sit on the highway between stops. The point is to ride cool roads.<\/p>\r\n

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Overall the 45 is a very mixed bag – long slow stretches following cars with yellow lines, but also the occasional faster stretches with nice curves and views. All up it was rather sobering to be riding along the coastline which had been devastated by the tsunami. The entire coast is now huddled behind a 14m high concrete wall and it’s impossible to see the ocean unless one is up on a hill. I guess everybody feels better this way, especially with the devastation still such a recent memory. But as an outsider it is difficult to understand, it seems to me it would be better to rebuild the towns higher up in the hills and leave the coast for farmland with the risk that it might get inundated once every 50-100 years or so. The way the coast is wrapped in concrete is very ugly to me and I can’t see many people coming to visit these places anymore.<\/p>\r\n

But for the people who live with the memory of this disaster, and seeing all the empty places where once houses and villages stood, I guess it is not such a high price to pay.<\/p>\r\n

Unfortunately I made a few poor choices with my stops today.. I went to see a few coastal highlights such as interesting rock formations, but overall they weren’t all that spectacular.. and while I did stop at a small tsunami memorial, for some reason I had neglected to put the big one on my route for today. In retrospect that would have been a far better stop.<\/p>\r\n

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One place which I did not regret going to is a daibutsu, a giant buddha statue overlooking the coast. Always quite impressive and I didn’t realize that Japan has so many of these dotted around all over the place.<\/p>\r\n

Overall it was a bit of a rushed day as I had quite a lot of distance to cover, and I did not want to do it on the highways. At the end of the day it was quite good that I didn’t stop too often since I got to the property just as it was getting dark. Even though it was still well before sundown, the heavy clouds made it much darker than it should have been.<\/p>\r\n

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The place I sopped for the night, Dari Pension, is run by a guy who has accumulated a pretty impressive whiskey collection – over 800 bottles! After onsen and dinner I sat down and tried a couple, chatting with the owner as good as I could with my broken japanese and lots of Google Translate..<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryusendo (Iwata) to Zao Weather: heavy clouds all day with some showers. 15C in the morning, with a high of 21C during the day but mostly cooler.Distance: ~400km << Previous Day | Next Day >> | Photo Album | Video Today was a day of mostly following the 45 along the east coast.. Woke up later around 6:30, then had a huge breakfast and was finally ready to leave by around 8am. It was pretty fresh heading off to the coast, where I picked up the start of the 45. The GPS kept trying to push me onto the E45, but what’s the point of a motorcycle tour if you just sit on the highway between stops. The point is to ride cool roads. Overall the 45 is a very mixed bag – long slow stretches following cars with yellow lines, but also the occasional faster stretches with nice curves and views. All up it was rather sobering to be riding along the coastline which had been devastated by the tsunami. The entire coast is now huddled behind a 14m high concrete wall and it’s impossible to see the ocean unless one is up on a hill. I guess everybody […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,41,22],"tags":[96,42,23],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-motorbike","category-travel","tag-japan","tag-motorbike-2","tag-travel-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micha.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}