Day 46 Don’t Want To Leave Kyushu! Cycling Friendly Fukuoka

Jun 15 • Blog, Kyushu • 2951 Views • 3 Comments

Choosing which bread to buy in a bakery in Japan can be a time consuming process. Particularly in this bakery where I stopped for breakfast, I had to circle around several times to decide which one to eat for breakfast. There were so many cute ones too, like these Totoro (a character from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film, “My Neighbor Totoro”).

Fukuoka is famous for Mentaiko, which is spicy cod raw. This is a staple delicacy when people think of Fukuoka, along with Hakata ramen that I’d eaten the day before. Mentaiko is very good with white rice, but in a bakery, it goes on top of a baguette. Why not?

After my breakfast stop at the bakery, I cycled to Kitakyushu, the city in the northern tip of Kyushu island. Japan is made up of four main islands, Hokkaido (where I’m heading to), Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. I’d been in Kyushu up to this point, and I was getting to the northern end of it.

As I cycled over 80km this day, I came by these field filled with water. They are rice fields getting ready for their planting.

I came across a very cute road sign. Can you see the giant turtle painted on the pavement?

As this was a Sunday, many cyclists were out, enjoying the spring weather. When I was cycling in the hills of Munakata City, two cyclists passed by me, waited for me at after an uphill to talk to me. We cycled together for a while and they guided me and told me about the boat I needed to take to cross a small channel later. Thank you, cyclists from Kitakyushu! All this way up to the northern end of Kyushu, people had been so very friendly.

Wow, this field of milk-vetch (astralagus) was the biggest that I’d ever seen! The entire place was pink and smelled sweet, and little kids were playing in it.

I’ve played with these flowers a lot when I was growing up too.

As I avoided the main roads, I came across so many beautiful sights, including Kanesaki Beach. There was no one apart from a man with a dog, who soon left. On the private beach of my own, I ate a piece of chocolate and rested in the sun for a while.

So I got to Wakato Ohashi, the bridge and channel that the two cyclists had told me about. This red bridge reminded me a little bit of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge! As cyclists were not allowed on it, I took a three minute boat ride to cross to the other side.

As you’ve seen in all of my previous posts, everyone in Kyushu had been so extremely warm and friendly. I was honestly getting afraid of leaving Kyushu, and wished I could stay there longer. I’ve lived abroad for many years and you’d think I wouldn’t be afraid of going anywhere in Japan. For some reason, it made me quite nervous to get to the end of Kyushu. I was only hoping that the rest of my trip would be anywhere near what I’d been experiencing up to this point.

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