The next time I saw them was in Vladivostok where I saw Joan wave at me as I rounded a corner while trying to find a hotel with another guy I met in Mongolia and bumped into again in Russia. Joan and Vicente made it to Vladivostok a few days earlier and just missed the ferry going to Japan. As it's a weekly ferry they then had a bit of a wait and despite the stories of no ferry availability I managed to get on the same trip which left a few days after I arrived.
Once again I had a straight forward exit from a country and left Russia heading toward South Korea for a few hours and then Sakaiminato in Japan. By the time we arrived in Japan we stuck together to get through all the formalities which all took by far the longest I have experienced on the trip so far and after only thirty hours from the ship docking we were free to leave. Because I had absolutely no plans for Japan I agreed to tag along with my new friends.
It turns out that way back in the past there was a gay called Hasegura Tsunenaga who was sent out on a mission toward Rome with a group of samurai warriors. They made it to Italy and back but some of the samurai seemed to like a small Spanish town so much that they just stayed there. As a result there are lots of people living there with Japanese surnames. My new travelling partners had been in touch with the home town (Sendai) of these samurai and were delivering a gift and a letter. Have a look at rutasamurai.com, theres an English section for those with rusty or no Spanish.
So off I went into the rising sun (sorry for the painful cliche) to find Sendai. It turned out to be an amazingly easy trip because I didn't have to worry about directions and we didn't take the expressway up because it would be dull, plus quite expensive.
On the way up I learned that most of Japan is not for a European motorcyclist. There's way too much traffic, the vast majority of the trip is limited to 50kph and the sprawl of suburbia just goes on and on and on. Once away from these areas however you end up in the mountains where the forest covered slopes are largely empty other than a corridor following the road and the road signs which are in Japanese and English show an amazing wealth of history. Some day it would be good to come back and retrace sections of the trip with a few weeks to see it all properly, I really don't think I've seen so much in the way of signposted history and dams you can crawl over in such a small area.
Like the expressways, we found accommodation expensive but managed to camp out a little. One of the nights we managed to get a woman in a hotel to let us camp out the back, only for the space available to turn out to be car park not belonging to the hotel. Then the police turned up before the tents were pitched only to shoo us on. This turned out fine because the policeman then agreed to show us an alternative spot which turned out to be a public park. Thankfully although it was a Saturday night it was unlike Scottish parks which can often be full of marauding children with bottles of Buckfast in hand.
And so it was that I arrived in Japan, slept in public parks, drove a long distance more slowly than I thought I could imagine and worked my way to the city of Sendai. It was in Sendai that the final purpose of the trip for my colleagues ended. On our night of arrival we tried to arrange a fix for Vicentes bike, like my F800GS it also developed an electrical problem in Mongolia and he also required some heavy truckin action towards Ulaanbaatar. In the end although we thought it was another rectifier issue the BMW mechanic at Sendai Platz ran the bike through diagnostics and it turns out that his alternator is at fault as opposed to the rectifier. There's none spare in Japan and we just continued the pattern used since we got off the ferry of letting his battery run low before swapping batteries and jump starting my bike from the good battery where the electrics would charge up the flat battery again. I paid my way in electricity I think.
Meeting up with the folks in Sendai was strange, there was a city interpreter who's speciality was Spanish though her high school English was great. She looked after us and we met all manner of people from the Sendai international centre the afternoon after we arrived. What also was strange was that evening meeting up with the local Hispanic society for dinner. It was an interesting mix of trying to speak or understand Japanese, Spanish and English and there were a few mini electronic translators doing the rounds.
Although I'm not a big fish fan, never mind raw fish I went for it with dinner as plate after plate of Japanese food was brought out along with a couple of the ladies constantly filling up my glass with warm sake. In the end I ate some kind of fish testes, raw salmon, cuttlefish, tuna, yellowfish and who knows what else as the plates just didn't stop. It was a good night though and one of the most strange parts was a bit of chat about karaoke when they said there were bars that offered songs in English to sing along to. This wasn't strange in itself but my mental blank about what Scottish bands might be available to sing to was ended when both of the women I was talking to started to get really excited about the Bay City Rollers. Apparently their songs are popular on the karaoke circuit here, possibly helped by the lead singer marrying a Japanese woman some years ago.
Location:３丁目,Kawaguchi City,Japan
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