一ヶ月前の琵琶湖一周の物語を続きます。第一幕はこちら。

I'm finally getting around to continue the story from “Bicycle Ride Around Japan’s Largest Lake, Part 1”, a 230km (143 mile) ride I did with a few friends a month ago. I've done a bunch of long rides since (115km, 143km, 147km, 145km, 50km, and 140km), but this remains my longest ride so far.

Here I'll repeat the map that leads the first post:

In the upper-rightish is the city of Nagahama, and that's about where the first post ended, so that's where this one picks up. We're moving around the lake in a counter-clockwise direction, so we're still not half way.

For a while north of Nagahama there's no road along the shore, so we have to head inland a bit...

There wasn't much traffic this far north in the boonies, but at one point a huge crane slowly passed us, making me feel like Princess Leia consular vessel being slowly overtaken and consumed by Darth Vader's Imperial Stardestroyer.

At about our half-way point, the main road goes through a long modern tunnel under some mountains. We'd rather go over the mountains, so we got onto the old original road and climbed the 50 vertical meters to an old tunnel...

The name, written above the entrance (backwards) is 「賤ヶ嶽隧道」, using the old word (suido) that's since been replaced by the Japanification of the English word “tunnel”. According to a plaque just inside the entrance, it took a bit more than a year of digging to break through the 1,260 shaku of length (382m / 418yd), and another two and a half years to actually finish the tunnel in 1927 at a cost of 279,642 yen. I don't know what the exchange rate was 88 years ago, but today that's about $2,250.

Inside the tunnel it was pitch black except for a splash of light in the center. Even in the day where you can easily see both openings, I wouldn't want to do it without a light, for fear of monsters and creepy things. Ugh.

But a slow shutter can see in the dark, so after I got home I got to actually see what the inside of the tunnel looked like:

Through to the other side, we were treated to a nice view of the lake....

This is pretty much at the exact spot where the green arrow in the map above touches at the top.

The most direct path around the lake cuts off a peninsula of mountains that pierces the lake at its top, but of course we wanted to hug the lake as much as possible, and climb the mountains as much as possible...

Half an hour of hard climbing later...

I went ahead and tried to set up for a panning “action” shot of Gorm flying by, hoping I'd get everything blurry except him....

He's sort of blurry too, but I'll claim partial success.

Once we alighted from the mountain, we had a pretty simple/flat 60-or-so kilometers (~40mi) shot down along the shore to complete our loop.

Japanese people seem to love to smolder plant clippings, spreading smoke everywhere. One farmer deciding to get rid of some cuttings can ruin a whole town's futons and other fabrics hug out to dry. It boggles my mind, but people just seem to think it's natural.

Two hours after descending the mountain, we catch our first sight of the gate for the Shirohige Shrine, which we'd visited from the other (closer to Kyoto) direction a month prior on my first ride that exceeded 100km. That was the subject of “Pleasant 105km Bike Ride Takashima’s Shirohige Shrine”...

20 minutes and 8km later, we're much closer...

This was the first thing around the whole lake that was familiar, and at least to me signaled the end of the challenge. Now we just had to get home, but that was still a few hours off.

Finally at 6:00 in the evening we overlapped our morning path, completing our trip around the lake.

This was taken near the site of this photo from the morning, almost 12 hours earlier.

Now that we had completed the loop, we had to pop back over to Kyoto, which first involved a 105m climb over a small mountain...

I'm happy with the amount of blur I get in the wheels and spokes at this shutter speed.

Kumiko was happy because she could do the hill (and indeed the entire day) in her clip-in shoes. It gave her a lot of confidence with them.

Gorm was happy because he got to have a nice rest while waiting for us; he flew up that mountain.

Part of the descent down the other side is really steep, but the effect is enhanced by being right next to a highway....

After that, just before arriving home, there was one final 50m hill. The other side of the hill was the first little climb of the day, and I was happy to find out when looking at the data later that I made a personal-best fast time on both the climb leaving Kyoto that morning, and the climb returning home that evening. Both little climbs were ones that I had given my all on before, so it was all the more gratifying to make PRs on them as bookmarks to my longest ride (in time and distance).

I returned home after almost 14 hours on the bike, and felt great. I guess distance doesn't tire me out, just vertical climb, and this one had only about 1,500m (4,800 ft). The rides I've done since are shorter, but usually have much more mountain climbing.