Beside Lake Towado briefly before a stop at the new roadside station.
With good facilities and ample parking, overnight stays are popular and well catered for – both in campers, but also kei cars.
A prolonged climb took us over the crater rim – lovely forest, good views, impressive roads (and viaducts) and some waterfalls too. Still pleasantly cool in the morning.
Choosing the shorter, scenic route doubled our climbing for the morning to over 400 m – but did give us a great descent to Kosaka – a town built on extensive copper and silver mining and processing. The industry is not quite as large as it once was, but metal processing still plays a part. There was an area of restored European buildings, from the town’s heyday, that we looked around.
Playhouse, with rotating stage.
(Rachel’s photo.)
Hazardous staircase for the tall; even I had to watch I didn’t crack my head on the underside.
Late morning spent riding the twenty kilometres to Kazuno up the valley floor, successfully avoiding the main road. Still very much enjoying the contrast between the bright rice fields of the flats and the dark forest covering the hills behind.
With a bit of topiary in the mix too.
And the odd factory.
Chickens apparently a theme around these parts.
(Rachel’s photo.)
(Rachel’s photo.)
In town we found a long, once-bright, covered shopping street while we hunted for lunch.
Somehow our searching online gave us a restaurant that was in a flash hotel; being hungry cyclists, we made sure we got our money’s worth. Yum!
A bit more of the same early afternoon as the valley gradually narrowed.
More poultry!
A rubbish bin in the wild!!
Leaving the rice fields behind, into the forest now – on some increasingly marginal roads that mostly connected.
A bit overdue, we detoured to bathe at a small onsen built right beside a river that just screamed flash flood risk.
Cue more big concrete walls.
A very pleasant and quiet onsen over, we tried our luck continuing up the valley on the steep side road. Unfortunately that meant I was soon covered in sweat again. Oh well, cleanliness was nice while it lasted.
The road started to show signs that it might not be maintained.
Frustratingly, as we were only a kilometre from rejoining the main road, we could go no further with our loaded bikes.
Dropping a hundred metres, and then regaining those metres, had us riding through a sparse, spread-out and deserted for the season mountain village. But we did find the local konbini not quite closed – time for an ice cream sandwich, which were becoming a favourite.
As drizzle closed in, we were pleased to find that our wild camping option just up the road (at a small park marking the fortieth parallel north) was adequate – as the campground we had planned to stay at was closed due to bear sightings. Amusingly, we found the young Belgian cyclist we’d met the previous day had found the same place to camp.