Email Message #181:
Kyoto, Japan, Layover Day
October 6, 2000
We had a lovely selection of Western and Japanese foods for breakfast. We wanted to have Japanese food for our meals. Judy B. and I decided we would take a bus to the Kyoto Handicrafts Center to look at possible items for gifts. It had five floors of all kinds of handicrafts...lacquer ware, kimonos, yukatas, obis, jewelry, block prints, chopsticks, etc. We spent abut 2-3 hrs there until we were too hungry to think anylonger.
We left the center and just walked down the street looking for a place where we could buy food for lunch. We shortly found a little Japanese fast food place that placed the food in nicely arranged box. I looked at the plastic reproduction of the lunches they offered and just pointed to one that looked tasty.
We then followed signs to a park. We found a picnic table behind the fence of a baseball field. There was a game going on as we are our lunch. One surprising event happened while eating lunch was that we felt an earthquake. Our picnic table was very solid and on a cement pad. At first I thought that Judy was somehow shaking the table, but it really was to heavy for her to do that. Then as the shaking continued and the ground beneath me seemed to liquefy, I realized that we were experiencing an earthquake. I saw a street sign swinging and swaying quite a bit. All the people around us didn't react at all. Judy told me that she had heard that earthquakes happen so often that the Japanese people take it all in stride.
Later that evening we heard that the epicenter was at Tottori, the city that we were schedule to stay for one night. The earthquake registered at 6+ on the Richter scale at the epicenter.
Judy and I then walked through a shrine that was close by. It had a huge orange gatehouse we walked through. The rest of the buildings were also painted orange. We saw that many paper wishes had been tied on the branches of a leafless bush. Some of the attendants were taking these paper wishes off and putting them in a large plastic bag. I don't know what was going to be done with the paper wishes.
We stopped at a water fountain that had a dragon on the top. We saw many people come wash their hands and take a drink of water, and take their pictures. So we had to do it ourselves. We then walked several kilometers to go to the Gion district that is known for its nightlife.
We walked along the river that flows through Kyoto. It is like many other rivers I have seen in large cities...the banks of the river are covered with stones to protect it from erosion. One side has a very nice promenade along it where we walked. There was a high level and a low level nearer the water. Many young couples like to sit together along this promenade.
There were quite a few water birds on the river. Mallard ducks, white egrets, gray herons, and a little brown heron that had green legs and greenish-brown bill. It would be fun to have a bird book for Japan, but I didn't look for any Cairns.
We finally walked through the Gion district. We got to a main one way street where we saw lots of taxis bringing people to a place that may have a Geisha show. It did look like an important event that you need a ticket for admission. A few minutes later we saw two women dressed in the Geisha outfits walking down a narrow street.
I wanted to walk back to the Kyoto Handicraft center to make some purchases that I had thought about all afternoon. We met Bill Sokolik, an Odyssey rider from Washington State, on the streets. He has a reputation for shopping, so we invited him to come along with us. We shopped for one hour until the store closed, then took a bus back to our hotel.
At dinner, Tim Kneeland (the Odyssey Organizer) announced that due to a very great possibility of having problems with shipping the bikes out of Japan, he had decided to leave them in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia for the rest of our stay in Japan. Our Japanese leg of the bicycle tour has turned into a bus tour.
Tomorrow, 10-7-200, we will be bused to the west side of the island of Honshu to a very popular Japanese Tourist destination called, Amanohashidate. We will have a layover day there to enjoy the environs. Then on Monday, Oct. 9 we will be bused to the area of Mt. Sambe, another popular tourist area for hiking. Tuesday, Oct. 10, we are bused to the island of Miyajima, near Hiroshima. We will have a layover day there on Oct 11. Then on Oct. 12, 90% of the riders will fly to Kyala Lumpur, where our charted Malaysian 747 waits for us to fly us to Hong Hong.
We are scheduled to stay overnight in Kuala Lumpur, then fly to Hong Kong. The last 10% of the group will fly directly to Hong Kong on Friday, Oct. 13. This currently new agenda will put us back on schedule to bicycle China, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. (Stay tuned to further messages to find out if this itinerary works out for us.) Remember, when I wrote at the beginning of the tour in Panama about how this tour was a great learning ground of patience and flexibility?..Well it continues!