Who Are Yuba?

Big travel day today.

Had breakfast in the awesome kitchen of our accommodation- even got to make a pot of filtered coffee with freshly ground beans.

Said goodbye to our new friends, and packed up and got back on our bikes. My legs hurt today – tbh I would’ve preferred not to be riding today. But we had to do the final push to Imabari today.

Off we went…

Saw this cool blinged up truck

Stopped for morning tea at the cutest cafe ever – Shozen. Although Steve ended up having lunch (curry) and I had the cake set. The cafe was so cute with penguins everywhere! I bought a souvenir bag and told the owner I love penguins (in Japanese) she was so excited and gave me a badge for free.

We were kind of on a tight schedule however, so couldn’t dilly dally as much as we’d have liked to have stayed there all day.

The last bridge across to Imabari is HUUUGGEEE. It is 6 km long and the ride up to it is intense. Last year I did it on a “Mama Chari” bike – and I actually don’t know how I did it. I struggled this time even with a better bike.

As bad as the inclines are, it’s worth it for the downhill parts. So much fun!

Huge bridge doesn’t look as huge in photos

It took longer than we had planned to get to Imabari, so we were in a bit of a rush when we got to the station and dropped off our bikes. We only 20 mins or so until our bus left and I hadn’t had lunch because I had the cake set earlier.

So I grabbed an onigiri from the Lawson and lined up for our bus. We bumped in to our friends from the hotel who were catching the bus back the same way as us on account of a nasty accident one of the had on their bike. Bike totalled, elbow injured.

Ironically, the bus was taking us all the way back across all the bridges we had just rode across – back to Fukuyama where we had started this journey mere days ago.

At Fukuyama we got on the Shinkansen bound for Kyoto.

Getting in to Kyoto was quite nostalgic- we haven’t been here for about 10 years.

But again, no time for dilly dallying, we had to get to our accommodation- which for some unknown reason we booked a places deep in the mountains of Kyoto.

We caught a train to Hanzomon station, then a taxi to the hotel. The taxi drove for what seemed like forever up the side off a mountain into forest. I was regretting my life choices at that particular point in time. Wondering why we didn’t just stay somewhere closer to the station….

But not only did we make it to the hotel, but we also made it in time for dinner, just. Dinner was delicious – we got the Yuba/Tofu set and it was really good. Yuba is formed when making tofu and it so so good. My favourite thing.