Japan part 3

The next day I headed straight in to town to find the Eukor office. Eukor is a shipping company which apparently provides RORO services. Apparently. I hadn't had any confirmation of that from other people and hadn't heard of anyone else using them in the past. Still, it was my only lead and I had to try. But I wasn't in a good mood. I was getting increasingly frustrated in Japan because I just wasn't able to achieve anything (fix the bike, leave the country etc.) If this company also turned out to be a dead end I was almost considering paying someone to 'steal' the bike and getting on the next plane to anywhere.

Well, it turned out that although they do have a RORO ship, and the ship does go to various ports in SEA, they don't discharge anywhere useful to me. They would quite happily send it back to Europe but quite frankly that wasn't particularly helpful. I asked them if they knew of anyone else that could help. After lots of trawling through business listing they eventually came up with another company, WWL, who might be able to help. They even produced a shipping schedule, which was nice. It looked good, but meant that I would have to ship to Singapore rather than Bangkok. That's fine though, so long as I can get there I can do Thailand and everything else some other time.

So off to visit WWL.

M: Hi, I need to send my motorcycle to Singapore.
WWL: OK, fine.
M: *sigh* Well do you know of someone else who, wait, did you just say 'fine'?
WWL: Yes. No problem.
M: Ok........How about the ship leaving on 26th?
WWL: Yeah that's fine. It goes from Yokohama and costs $500.
M: $500? Really?
WWL: Something wrong?
M: Bargain. And I can definitely use this ship?
WWL: Yes
M: Are you sure?
WWL: Yes
M: For $500?
WWL: Yes
M: You will take a motorcycle?
WWL: Yes
M: To Singapore?
WWL: Yes

.....

M: There's got to be a catch.
WWL: Why do you say that?
M: It's a long story. Just give me a ticket or something in writing. I will pay you cash now.
WWL: No, sorry, can't do that.
M: Urgh.

The problem was customs. Of course. When is customs ever not a problem? WWL was insisting that I get an agent to do the clearing for me whereas I just wanted to do it myself. But after much discussion it was obvious they weren't going to budge.

This time I didn't want to drive around Tokyo any more. So I spent an entire evening bombarding every customs agent I could find with emails. Then the next day I spent all day on the phone following up every single one of them. It didn't go particularly well. A typical conversation went something like this.

M: Hi, I am sending a motorcycle to Singapore. I have arranged for it to be put on a ship in Yokohama but I need someone to do the customs clearance for me.
Customs agent: So why are you calling us?
M: Well, because you are a customs agent. You do do customs clearance, don't you?
CA: Yes.
M: Great. So you can clear my bike then?
CA: No.
M: *sigh* What's the problem? All I want is for you to fill out a form, take it to customs and I will give you lots of money in return.
CA: No we don't do that.
M: You don't do customs work?
CA: No
M: But you're a customs broker.
CA: So?
M: *muffled scream of rage*
CA: Is there anything else I can help you with?
M: *click*

All the customs people I spoke to were under the impression that I could clear customs by myself. So I called WWL who again insisted that I find an agent. Eventually I managed to convince someone to call WWL and clear things up with them personally. Once that happened everything went smoothly.

Mr. Omori turned out to be very helpful and forgiving and sorted everything out for me. His services cost nearly as much as the shipping itself but by this point I didn't care. I was just glad to be leaving bureaucracy behind me. With everything sorted and the date confirmed I finally left Tokyo heading south.

First stop, Mt. Fuji. Last time I came to Japan I didn't get to see Fuji because of cloud. Still, I had a good feeling about today.

Urgh.

Fifth station at 2400m. The road ends here.

Autumn was properly taking a hold now so the trees were amazing.

Along the way I stopped in to Shizuoka. Shizuoka isn't really a place that tourists would go to but it's where I was 12 years ago. Despite not remembering anything about it I somehow managed to find the strangely shaped concert hall where we performed.

Communication has been really difficult in Japan but by now I was well versed in how to do things - just do it and someone will shout if you are doing it wrong. So I just ignored everything around me and burst straight in to the main hall. It was a lot smaller than I remember it. Of course that might have had something to do with the thousands of people that populated it. On the stage a podium was set up with someone giving a speech. I was grabbed from behind and hurried back out the door by security.

Apparently bursting in unannounced and uninvited on a high level government conference is something that is frowned upon in Japanese society.

I only wanted to get a picture of the hall but security wasn't happy about that. So I pretended to leave the building but instead skulked around on the upper floors for a while trying to find an open door while hiding from the cameras. Turns out the Japanese are quite good at locking doors. Oh well, it was half and hours entertainment.

This was quite an annoying ride. I was heading to Kyoto, probably 600-700km from Tokyo. But except for the little diversion to Mt. Fuji I hadn't left the city. Along the cost there is nothing but dense urban development and I was getting really fed up of it. I just wanted to get into the mountains. So when I found this road I was really pleased with myself. At least until I came to this.

The road was closed for, as far as I could tell, no reason at all. I had to turn around. I tried 2 more mountains roads that day but both of them were closed as well. No idea what was going on, but by now I hated riding in Japan. All the good roads were closed. All the roads that were open went through the city which meant constant stopping at red lights (Japan has an impossibly long traffic light cycle) and constant death from being run over by taxi drivers.

Kyoto is the other big tourist draw in Japan, apart from Tokyo. It is home to a huge number of temples, shrines and castles. Visiting them all properly takes a couple of weeks. But I had already been to quite a few while in Japan so I wasn't bothered about seeing everything, just a few.

These photos aren't actually as bad as I thought there were going to be. All the sights in Kyoto (and Nikko a week or so earlier) were amazing. The trouble is everyone knows they are amazing and so they are rammed with tourists. I know there is a certain hypocrisy in complaining about tourists when I went there armed with a camera, but it is somewhat difficult to appreciate the tranquillity of a garden when you share it with a thousand other people, most of them school children. Scenes like this are very common.

On the upside Kyoto does host the Japanese take on Ashgabat.

So now I was massively annoyed by the never ending city and the never ending throngs of tourists. I was right next to one of the bridges leading to the island of Shikoku, a place that nobody ever goes to. This was definitely the best move I made in Japan.

Finally, solitude. No traffic. Fantastic views. Perfect roads. I was really glad nobody else seems to know about this place.

I was very used to seeing 'road closed' signs now. So when I came across another one it completely ruined my high. But nobody was around and I could actually squeeze past this one. So I did. That will teach the road services for needlessly closing roads just because they can.

Hmmm.

Talking with someone later that day I found out that many roads are closed at the moment because of landslides. The typhoon that had come through a few weeks earlier had dislodged vast amount of mountain and the small roads like this were just not big enough to be prioritised in the cleanup effort.

The most annoying thing is that at this point I was only 5 km from the place I was trying to get to, but the diversion to get around it was going to be 65km. Oh well, nothing I could do.

I stopped off at some vine bridges strung across a river.

These bridges are not as well visited as the more famous one further up the river, and I was really glad of that.

I had a hostel booked in Hiroshima that night and it was getting late so I ran to the other side of the island to catch the last ferry.

Stuck while they repair the road after yet another landslide

Hiroshima was a place I really wanted to come to. Now I have been there I don't know how to begin writing about it. So I won't.

Peace flame

Children's memorial

A-bomb dome

Peace memorial hall

Paper cranes

That evening I got an email from Mr. Omori telling me that the shipping date for my bike had been brought forward. I had only 2 days to get back to Tokyo from Hiroshima - a distance of about 1000km. At Japanese speeds that is next to impossible. The only realistic way of doing it was by taking the expressways but the tolls along was going to be around £150. I wasn't going to pay that. I put in a couple of really long days and made it back to Tokyo. I even got to stop off and view Fuji properly this time.

You know, I think the Japanese have lost Mt. Fuji. I'm not sure what other explanation there is. Clearly they have misplaced the mountain (probably down the back of a futon) but rather than admit their error they decided to built a giant weather controlling machine to permanently blanket the area in cloud. That makes the most amount of sense.

The next morning I went to Yokohama and met Mr. Omori at the port. He took me through all the paperwork, negotiated with the customs people and we left the bike in the hand of the warehouse staff to be loaded. I hope.

Yokohama

Last time I saw the Tranny

It was the weekend now and all the flights out of Japan were expensive. So I killed a few more days in Tokyo doing very little.

Finally the morning came for me to leave. I wasn't able to ship any luggage with the bike so had to repack and carry everything. I was rather late leaving the hostel for the train but still had time to make it. I got a few stops down before realising I had left something very important at the hostel. I dumped my very heavy bags in a locker and got on the train going the opposite direction. Before I reached the next stop I had realised that the thing I had left was actually in my backpack. Fail. Back to collect the luggage and I arrived at the airport train just in time to see it leave. The next train would be another 40 minutes. But even worse, Air Asia had told me to go to the wrong terminal. I spent a while wandering around unable to find the check in desk before working out I was at the wrong place. I eventually arrived at check in just 45 minutes before the plane left, a new record for me. But it was their fault. Sort of.

Check in Girl: Sorry, sir, we are now closed
M: No, you're not.
CG: Ok, this way please.

The cabin crew weren't very happy with me. But the Japan saga was finally over.

I enjoyed Japan, and it didn't disappoint, but I did find myself being very frustrated a lot of the time. The people are very friendly and helpful but there are lots of rules, and the rules must be followed all the time. It was also surprising that given Japan's reputation as a technologically advanced country it is actually quite difficult to find stuff - like lithium batteries. That's why the tracker stopped working at some point. The batteries ran out and despite looking in every single shop ever since I arrived in Wakkanai I couldn't find any more. Should have stocked up in that technological powerhouse of Mongolia.

So in honour of all this I thought I should put together a list of things that are impossible, or at least next to impossible, to find in Japan.

1. Spare parts for a Japanese motorcycle
2. Reasonably priced generic spare parts for any motorcycle
3. A straight answer from customs people
4. A speed limit greater than 50km/h
5. Internet access - Surprisingly difficult. I have a story about trying to find an Internet cafe in the middle of Tokyo. Not one of my finer moments
6. Lithium batteries
7. International ATM
8. Mt. Fuji

I don't have much luck with mountains. I'll have to come back and try again.