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Day 4: Venus Line and Utsukushi - Ga - Hara Open Air Gallery
I didn’t think things could get any better than the past two days on Izu Peninsular. The day started off confirming this, for about 20 minutes. Then I detoured up Route 199 off Route 142 out of Suwa and my morning grumpiness was quickly dispatched. There’s something so unstoppably grin inducing and therapeutic about a good set of bends on a quiet back road when you’re on a motorcycle. I keep going on like this, and I’m sorry if it’s putting you off reading what is really a pretty incoherent trip report. But perhaps someone out there will take my feverishness the right way and get their ass to Japan. Just this one little 9.15km section of tarmac goodness along 199 to 194 (where the Venus Line starts) would have me feeling like I’d found the best place in the world. If I had that in my neighbourhood back home I’d never leave. But it had been like this for the past two days of riding on Izu, and I would get a whole lot more of it on the Venus Line, coming up.
The Venus line is Number 2 on the top 16 rides in Japan, according to BikeJin Magazine, for good reason. It is quite frankly a masterpiece of engineering. You know those classic moto magazine shots making everyone jealous with a ribbon of asphalt twisting up a mountainside with some sweet bike parked by the roadside whilst your sorry ass sits in a boring office cubicle reading about it? Well those pictures are of the Venus Line (panorama). Whoever made this road deserves a prize. I stopped caring about the pervasive spread of artefacts of the anthropocene, and the catastrophic habitat fragmentation caused by humans’ roads, for a little while riding this road. Sometimes you just have to sit back and give credit where it’s due. Whoever these Japanese civil engineers and road pavers were, they made one of the best corner carving playgrounds. I guess I must have been one of the few new to it all, as I was the only one stopping to take photos every few bends (panoramas here). I guess all the locals going for a quick fang had a grin on their faces glancing at the slobbering foreigner on their way past.
Which brings me to bikes. I rented 250cc Kwaka Estrella from Ganz motos for $400/wk(!!!!!!!) It was an appliance in terms of sound, although had lots of shiny bits and a certain amount of Triumph Bonneville old stylishness. It did the job fine for touring in Japan given everything’s done at about 40km/h and I wasn’t carrying a passenger. Definitely of interest to me during the trip was to check out what Japanese people ride, given so many of our bikes in Australia come from there. First I must say there were many Harley riders! All manner of sport bikes were to be seen, of course, although there weren’t packs of CBR1000RR/ZX10R/GSX1000Rs… people more often had touring or sports touring bikes although I definitely saw a few AWOL race riders on the Izu Skyline. There was one guy went belting past down a right sweeper when I was heading up in the opposide direction. He held a very steady line, on the white line, knee down fully committed. I was impressed, and simultaneously made to feel a total fake getting my knee down, on an Estrella 250(!) on the same road… had a little chuckle to myself but hey, everyone was there to have fun. There weren’t perhaps as many European bikes as you’d see in Australia, and I only saw one Buell (XB9/12S) but pretty much it seemed they rode similar bikes to us. Only thing is everyone’s supposedly limited to 80km/h, making it seem pretty pointless when someone pulls up on a ZX14 LOL.
Another reason this day was the best one of my life so far was the discovery of an open air sculpture gallery, right on the Venus Line road in what would have been spectacular surrounds on a mountain top if it weren’t for the clouds in the way of the vista below. I hadn’t been planning doing anything on this trip except carve corners (and had spent much of the trip so far thinking how there was nothing along the way that could possibly be more fun and interesting than just the ride), but was certainly very happy to come across the Utsukushi - Ga - Hara sculpture gallery. I love sculptures. So it was pretty much sensory overload when I walked into this place after enjoying the ride so much, to find about 400 fascinating sculptures right there for me to walk around and marvel at. I remember sitting there in an auditorium watching a video of some professional photography of the sculptures (great shots of them in winter with snow etc) set to some really cool ambient music and thinking I was basically having the best holiday ever. Anyway, check out my silly poses in front of the some of the sculptures…
Then it was on to Suzaka to possibly try to do the next route on the list but this is when the map finally failed me. I had been using the crowdsourced map, OpenStreetMap. The routing tool, OpenStreetMap Routing Machine (OSRM), had been used to design the route with help of fellow corner junkies on Gaijin Riders forum and using three of the 16 aforementioned BikeJine mag routes for guidance. Once you’re happy with the route, you can export it as .GPX format. I then loaded this route in OSMand, an Android app providing maps and route guidance, also based on OpenStreetMap (OSM). This app was especially useful for a foreigner like me in Japan because I could do everything offline. I have a HTC Desire HD which you can’t, apparently, easily use in Japan. You have to rent a sim card and this is hard to find. I tried buying a 3G/internet-only SIM card but it didn’t work so I had to get a refund. Also, without a GSM connection my phone refuses to let the GPS work, so basically I was down to using OSMand as a paper map, whilst still being able to use it to make distance calcs. I overlaid the route designed in OSRM using the .GPX file and all worked seamlessly until a little tertiary (supposedly) road called Route 342 of Route 66 near Suzaka. The first bad sign is this road wasn’t signposted like most roads of this class are, so I went past it by 5km. I after comparing the shape of the bends with the map I decided I’d found the right one and all looked fine for the first couple of kilometres, before it turned into a grass track… See photo. I have since looked at the satellite imagery and it’s pretty bad in this area. The route someone has put in doesn’t seem to follow what’s in the image either so I guess it’s a GPS trace. I note that there were two minor looking left turn offs from the road which I didn’t do sorties down, which I may have been meant to take but it all looked pretty suss when I was there so I decided to turn back and stick to the far more promising looking Route 403 through Obuse. This finally got me on the right track but by then I was pretty exhausted and got lost again in Nakano having missed a turn off somewhere and took ages trying to find Route 292 which would put me on Shiga Kusatsu Road, the third and final of the routes I was trying to tick off. So I decided to call it quits at 4pm and find a place to rest. I can say this is the only point on the trip where I wished the GPS worked, as I would have been able to check if I should have taken a left where it looked like I should have followed 342 ahead. Nevermind, at least this road needs to be reclassified to something less than tertiary.
Again I was met with excellent assistance at Nakano train station – in the form of a travel agent! They called around and found me the cheapest bed for the night, lo and behold 10km back down the road in Suzaka! Nevermind I was very happy to have someone help me out so much, they gave me a couple of maps as well so the day ended well.
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