I spent the most wonderful day on Friday cycling around the mountains beyond Uji City, near Kyoto.

I had gone to the area earlier in the week for what I called a “Kasatori Festival”, doing the climb up Mt. Kasatori from all four directions. It's a tiny mountain that I visited on one of my first bike rides, at that time finishing just one of the short climbs utterly spent.

I'm in better shape now, though the ridiculously-steep Eastern approach climb killed me.

While futzing around with the ride data afterwards, I realized that this was the area I visited years ago on photo hunts with friends, producing a dozen blog posts starting with “Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road”. It was a memorable couple of days, but I hadn't put two and two together when returning to the area with cycling.

So, I set out on Friday with the intention to revisit some of the spots from those 2011 trips, to connect my old world with my new. (The trip ended up on Strava as “Rediscovering Old Memories in Uji”.)

The village is lovely, though (or because) there's nothing there but some farmers. It's on a dead-end road so there's no through traffic. Time sort of stops there.

I saw only one person the entire time I was there, who as I rode by exclaimed “Wow, a foreigner!”. We chatted for a while. He was suitably impressed that I had cycled from Kyoto. 🙂

Doubling back through the village and up a bit, I then had a fun descent that seemed to go on forever. I was taking it easy and just enjoying it. Here's a video of the descent from my bike's front camera.

I enjoyed the long descent, but had chills thinking of making the ascent, which would somehow be longer than the descent. So, I'll try to go out and do it soon, to get it behind me.

I was following a route made from OpenStreetMap, a map that showed a single road through the village, leading to the road I wanted to take...

I could hear traffic above me, but the 20% slope seen in the photo above was the flat, tidy part of the road... what lay in front was much steeper, narrower, and strewn with dry pine needles. I wasn't about to attempt it.

About this time it dawned on me that perhaps the map wasn't complete. I spend a lot of time fixing poorly-routed roads in OpenStreetMap, but this was a case of wholesale wrong data. I've since gone and fixed the roads in this part of the village, so now the map better reflects reality.

I eventually found my way, to a road filled with big dump trucks, and soon found out why.

I had to make my way back to the top of that big lovely descent, but via a route I'd never been on. I assumed it would be hellaciously steep, and with the temperature peaking at 40° (104F), I was dreading it. But the steep parts never came, and by some quirk of math and physics I found myself back at the top without the expected climb. Not sure how that happened.

I descended a different direction via a different road, one utterly lovely in its own way. This descent had a wide, smooth road. It was my first time on it, but it certainly won't be my last... it was just lovely. I made a video of it, too. Just lovely.

That video ends with me turning onto a road that loops around a tollway exit for 1.2km (¾ of a mile). The loop stands out on the map, so I figured it'd be used as a kind of “velodrome” segment, so I spent some time going around it in both directions, and made Strava segments such as “Kusatori IC Velodrome CW from South”. I figured wrong, though, as it turns out that only one other person had ridden on any of them.

The loops are interesting, though. One direction has a hundred meters of twisty 14% climb in it, and the other obviously has a twisty 14% descent. But it's a loop, so in either case you end up with as much ascent as descent. But the different mix gives the different directions quite a different flavor.

Anyway, I was then on to my next memory, hopefully to find Ice-Cream Girl (or, at least, ice cream), but sadly, it wasn't to be:

So, I made my way up the street a bit for some udon...

I passed Rural Uji’s Kiyotakigyuu Shrine and headed up for my biggest climb of the day. On the way I would come across the location of this “Eerily Bright” photo, and hoped I'd recognize it. Literally five seconds after thinking “I'd never be able to recognize the spot after so much time”, I came around the corner and there it was:

The road continues up and up in the heavy forest, but there's one little break ⅔ of the way up where you can get a nice view:

The skyline is 43km (27mi) away, just about the same as this long view of Osaka from near my house, but it feels much farther here because of the haze.

Continuing, we come to a sign announcing what used to be at the end of the road:

The golf club's demise was brought about by 2013's typhoon #18, the same typhoon that brought the flooding seen in my blog's “A Bit More Rain in Kyoto Than Normal”.

Next on my list was another remote, isolated village at the end of a dead-end mountain road, one seen five years ago here and here.

As I was going by this field, someone yelled at me “You shouldn't be here!”, which threw me off for the short moment before he continued “It's too hot!”. It's his rice field above, and he was just finishing his first day of harvest. We chatted for a while. He would have liked to have gotten more done, he said, but he didn't bring enough to drink in the hot sun.

Having retired from whatever profession he did in his “first life”, he was now doing his “second life” as a part-time farmer, renting the field to make his own rice, all planted, tended, and harvested by hand. He said the resulting rice is delicious, and I don't doubt him one bit.

Done with my exploring, I made my way over two more passes and then down into Otsu City. It turns out that I got the KOM (“King of the Mountain”... the fastest time) on both descents. This always surprises me because I get them when I don't try.

I did try a bit on the second one, actually. I'd gotten the KOM on it earlier in the week without even thinking about it, so this time I thought about it, and made a new KOM by a wide margin.

Here's a video of the KOM descent.

In it you'll see that I'm not crazy... I stay in my lane unless I can see well ahead, and stay on the far side of my lane when approaching blind corners just in case an opposing car doesn't keep in its lane (which happens once toward the end). I also pass a car in a place where it's safe and legal to do so (though I was exceeding the speed limit a bit).

It was fun.

I then went to the cafe that Manseki introduced me to last year, seen here.

The owner is an avid cyclist, as is the waitress seen in the center of the photo above (and in cycling gear, here last year). She did a ride with Manseki and me in January that I'm reminded I still haven't posted about... I'll have to do that soon. (Update: here it is.)

I had to cross over one more mountain to get home, so I took the long, steep way that goes by a golf course. The late-afternoon sun was gorgeous....

All in all the ride was a bit shy of 100km. It was a lovely day.

Continued here...