Silver Week this year was as good as it gets with all 3 public holidays being in the working week from Monday to Wednesday. So with only 2 days of personal holidays, I could get 9 days in a row off work. I figured that this was enough to let me explore a bit further away from Tokyo, so I aimed for Aomori, the northern part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. On top of that I snuck out of work a little bit early on Friday afternoon to get a little head-start by heading up to Nikko for the first night, to avoid the mad holiday traffic out of Tokyo on the Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
Given it was a week with a lot of public holidays I pre-planned a lot of the route and pre-booked my hotels. I almost never do this, but it can be a bit difficult to find accommodation in Japan during these holiday weeks. While I have no idea how easy or difficult it would have been to find accommodation while enroute, I must say that in retrospect I very much dislike being this locked in to a travel plan. It caused some rushing and long days and locked me into certain areas despite the weather not always playing along.<\/p>\n
Speaking of weather, this year has been pretty miserable in Japan overall. On this trip in particular I had rainy, or at least heavily clouded-over weather for more than half the trip, with most of the really impressive roads and views being spoiled by the weather. That’s not to say I didn’t have any nice days or good stretches in between, I most certainly did! But overall it certainly could have been a little bit better and the poor weather certainly contributed to me missing out on some of my planned sights and stops.<\/p>\n
The bike performed well and without a hitch. I covered over 3,700km, mostly along country roads, and overall very much enjoyed the tour. I did get a bit wet from time to time as the adventure suit I have with its internal rainproof layer doesn’t really work well for extended riding in the rain. I really do need to get an external oversuit. Also my helmet intercom appears to have died on the last day, so I had no music on the long stretch back to Tokyo, but otherwise everything worked well. I especially liked my new phone holder which has moved the GPS above the dash and is now in a much better position.<\/p>\n
Overall I think I needed a couple of extra days for this trip. Alternatively I should have pushed a bit harder to get up north to then spend more time in Aomori, instead of concentrating on the roads up and down. I probably also should have spent more time researching places to stop at. While I stopped at some absolutely exceptional places they were mostly accidental and not pre-planned stops, whereas some of my preplanned stops turned out to be less spectacular. I also had to skip some of my planned stops due to running out of time on certain days. With a bit more time I could have visited all the places I wanted to go to or spend more time enjoying the places I did stop off at. In particular it would have been nice to “stop and smell the flowers” at a few places, such as the matsuri at the Jomon stone circle.<\/p>\n
Some of my personal highlights of the tour included:<\/p>\n
Photo Albums<\/a><\/p>\n Trip Statistics:<\/p>\n Individual days:<\/p>\n\n
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