After a wonderful ride with friends beyond Kyoto's Mt. Atago the other day, I returned the next day for 110km (68mi) of solo exploration in the same general area.

Early on in the ride I passed through Arashiyama in western Kyoto, with its famous bridge. We've seen it before on my blog in rain and in sun and crowned by a rainbow. Today was fairly bland, but a big bird was doing a batman pose, so that was something.

There's a path along the river southwest of the bridge that leads up to a temple with a great view that I visited some years ago, but apparently never posted about. Anyway, the path is fine for a road bike for a while, and from the path I got the photo at the top of the page.

Eventually the path ends as far as bikes are concerned:

It's probably not as bad as this climb, but I didn't have the guts to try it just now.

The road through the bamboo forest in Arashiyama is a public road open to cars, but folks treat it like their living room, wandering about aimlessly with their eyes glued to their camera or phone.

I then made my way up and over Mt. Atago, setting a PR (personal record) by a wide margin, which pleases me because I kept my effort low enough to not kill myself.

I missed beating my KOM time (“King of the Mountain”, the fastest time by a male) on the Nishigaya Dam Descent by three seconds because I saw a big monkey run across the road ahead of me, and didn't want to chance that there would be others. It's one thing to see wildlife at the side of the road when slowly grinding uphill, but quite another when plunging downhill at 70kph (45mph).

Then for the first time I did the long fun New Momiji Descent, and likely got the second-fastest time, but my activity doesn't match the segment for some reason. Sadly, the Strava support staff member assigned to my query about it is either really lazy or a complete jerk because the cut-n-paste responses have little to do with my actual question. It must be depressing to have a job you just don't care about. Sigh.

It was chilly (15℃/59℉) on the descent, so I was happy to find a coffee shop, but no one was around. I walked in and called out, but the place was deserted. Weird.

Much nicer than this, and sort of reminded me of this. I paused to fill up.

It wasn't unknown, actually, because I had done my homework. It's a short 180m at a steep 18% access road to a water-storage tank...

Pre-ride research had brought me to this page that includes info about this little climb. The photos at the time (three years ago) show little vegetation, but now it's overgrown and encroaching on the road in a photogenically-pleasing manner....

I moved around to try minor roads I'd never been on.

I discovered a lot of new climbs and fun descents, and make some nice PRs (including one climbing Kyomi North) without having killed myself in the process, so that was very nice.

Less nice were the two flats I got at the end. I think the second flat was a tube that was bad to begin with, though it lasted 10 minutes, so I don't know.

All in all it was a great outing. As a bonus, for the first time this year, I was actually ahead of my arbitrarily-picked 7,000km (4,350mi) goal for the year, which, after four months of unplanned travel, I didn't think I'd be able to make.

(I still might not make it, with less riding in the winter, but it looks promising.)

Here's the Relive.cc video of this ride...