This blog is about travelling through Japan on a bicycle. Initially on a foldable bicycle (Brompton) and more recently mostly by road bike (Spezialized)... but also by train, ferry, plane, bus or any other transport, if sea, weather, mountains or the like come between me and my desire to ride.
I have tried to summarise information that could be potentially helpful also for other bicycle travellers through Japan, such as list of bicycle roads, helpful web pages etc.

Monday 20 November 2017

Day 55 - Dazaifu to Fukuoka 大宰府から福岡へ

Bicycle touring Japan - Day 55

Today a relatively leisurely day with a short ride into central Fukuoka after a nice visit to a very nice zen garden and some Sumo in television in preparation for tomorrow. 

Bicycle: 20 km 
Riding time: 1:40 h
Total ascent:  38 m 
Route: Dazaifu to Fukuoka
Weather: Sunny, but very windy again, 8 C


The morning I spent very leisurely in the onsen of my hotel, alternating between the 3 rotenburos. While during the night it must have rained, by the time I was sufficiently washed the sun had come through. I didn't have a lot of touristic plan for today, as I was in Dazaifu early this year and had already seen all the major sights. But I remembered a very nice zen garden in a temple close to the main shrine, so I visited both. 


At the shrine there were again a lot of families with their 3, 5 or 7 year old kids. I think there were actually no 7 year olds, as today was a school day and most kids looked smaller. 


To the shrine leads a pair of very typical bridges:
After a quick visit to the street leading up to the shrine, full of omiyage shops, I continued on to the zen temple. 



One can sit on this "balcony" and gaze into the garden. Very relaxing.


This is how it looked back in May:



And here the same spot 6 months later:



I was also lucky that when I was there not many other tourists were visiting. But exactly when I left an enormous group (well, one bus load) of elderly Japanese entered.

With that I left Dazaifu behind me and road again very leisurely into Fukuoka. Part of my way was on the approach path to Fukuoka airport.


While I was riding on one of the typical Japanese bicycle lanes along a river.

This brought me to my final accommodation on this nearly 2 months trip through Japan, a Toyoko-Inn in central Fukuoka that I had reserved already 2 months ago, when I bought my sumo ticket. Tomorrow I will go to see the real thing, today I just watched it in TV, and saw Hakuho continuing his straight line of 8 wins in a row during this tournament as well as one match that needed to be repeated as the judges could not decide who was pushed outside of the ring first.

Bicycle touring Japan - Ride maps


For details on the bicycle tour today in Fukuoka, checkout the below maps:




No comments:

Post a Comment