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May 23

Ride to Tokushima

I woke up at 5 a.m., and apparently I wasn't the only one. All the old people were already up and about, going on walks and talking in the park.

I headed to Takamatsu, and went to the station's tourist information center. There I asked for directions to Takamatsu's Keirin Stadium, as well as advice on food. I was in Kagawa Prefecture, one of Shikoku's 4 prefectures, and famous for it's udon noodles. She directed me to a cheap place, which I got to just as the lunch rush was commencing.

The udon restuarant was somewhat cafeteria style, where you load your tray up with various goodies, like oden and onigiri, and then order the udon of your choice. I went with the zaru udon, which just like zaru soba, is a plate of plain, cold noodles which comes with a little cup full of tsuyu (broth) to dip the noodles in. It was a good selection: because of its plainness you could really taste the noodles.

My delicious lunch consumed, I rode to the Keirin stadium. It wasn't open that day because there weren't any scheduled races, but I took some pictures anyways, since the grounds were nice. They had a huge kids park with slides and such. I headed to the entrance and asked the ladies working there about a service counter. I was led to a small room with 3 guys wearing various cycling shirts, and after their preliminary skepticism, they warmed up after they saw my bike and we chatted about the trip and such. Eventually the boss man who came over brought me two books: "The Keirin History of 50 Years", and a book in Japanese which I can roughly translate as: "The Book on Keirin Becoming Interesting". He also handed me a few keirin phone straps.

I spent the rest of the afternoon riding to Tokushma, where I would be able to catch a ferry back to Tokyo the next day. I finally got there, and made the mistake of riding out to the port, which was an extra 5 km or so out of town, closed, with nothing going on. I did meet another cyclist, who had just finished a month long tour himself. We talked on the way back to downtown, and he had the brilliant idea of looking for a 24 hour game center to spend the night in.

Soon after, however, we lost track of each other, and although I was successful in using the phone book and calling a few places, none were open 24 hours on a Thursday night.

After a small dinner, I headed back to the port, and camped in the parking lot.