Bike Mag Exclusive - Rough Riding in Japan

2000 year old hot spring..... you'll be needing this later

Hara-san was describing the ride in metric. He was saying, pointing at a map that looked surprisingly benign, that we’d be riding about 30 kilometers, and that it would take four or five hours. Four to five hours? What (calculating rough translation into miles slowly in my head)? To ride about 19 miles? Did he think we were cripples? Nobody rides THAT slow...

The route was part of the Kumano ancient road, on the southern part of the Kii peninsula on Japan’s main island, Honshu. Pilgrims, traveling from Kyoto to Kumano on what was once as meaningful a trek for Shinto devotees as the pilgrimage to Mecca is to Muslims today, once followed the route in such numbers that they were described as “lines of ants making their way to Kumano.” Parts of the route that Hara was going to lead us on had been around for 1200 years, and the well-worn path, bordered with shrines and monuments and tokens of ancient passage, was older and more steeped in human history than any single piece of dirt I had ever ridden by several hundreds of years. Hara-san was tracing his thick finger along the map as we crowded around him in the entrance of our guest house, a hot spring resort that had been a hot spring resort for 2000 years.

We were in Japan to get first hands and feet on the newly revamped Shimano XTR components. A tour of the Shimano factory had been followed by an up close and personal assembling of the new XTR vaporware onto our own bikes. Then we’d piled into vans and driven late into the night until we arrived at a place more aged, in a human sense, than anywhere I have ever been before. Bathed in sulphur scented hot spring water, slept on tatami mat floors behind shoji screen walls, and awoke with the promise of strange and foreign trails in the air.

It took 45 minutes of head-down, back-hunched, staggering uphill hiking to clear the first two and a bit mile climb. The path was doubletrack broad, composed entirely of moss-covered stones that had been laid down centuries ago, and almost entirely unrideable. Housing in Japan is incredibly expensive, and the population density in towns and cities is intimate and close in ways that westerners can’t fully appreciate. There’s a reason for this. Most of the countryside is vertical. Japan, it would seem, is made up not of hills and mountains, but by one series of interlocking cliffs after another. And it became immediately apparent that we were going to be spending a day carrying our bikes, replete with the latest in XTR technology, up AND down more than our fair share of them.

If the first climb had been painful, the first descent was downright humiliating, bikes pinballing from one slimy rock garden to the next, rattling out of control down relentless staircases, and ricocheting off into the dense forest, sometimes with rider aboard, sometimes without. There were ten of us in total, five Shimano boys and five journalists, all of whom can boast a decent level of competence on a bike. We all crashed, and we all walked. A lot.

Then we began climbing again. In a muggy jungle heat, blanketed in the almost liquid saturated sound of cicadas and crickets and the occasional monkey rattling through the trees. Up, calves screaming. Down, sphincters puckered in exquisite fear. Rinse, repeat. After four hours, several cratering impacts, flats, and 2300 feet of slogging uphill, we were almost halfway. 7.5 miles. Shattered. Unanimously, we pulled the plug and whimpered back to the hot springs.

It wasn’t the kind of riding I ever want to do again. Nor was it the ideal environment to test equipment in any respect aside from brake feel and crash resistance (scored fine on both counts, by the way). But by the same token, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I stepped so far out of my comfort zone in one short ride that everything since then has seemed tame by comparison. Shimano rider Paul Thomasberg, summed it up best, as we rested our pumped forearms and cramping hands a few hours into the ride. Grinning broadly, he said “This might not be the kind of riding you were expecting, right? But I promise you this, you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.” Got that right.