Today's post is a continuation of “SUPER FUN!! Cycling in Supertyphoon Jebi” and its followup, “Surveying Supertyphoon Jebi’s Damage North of Kyoto, Part 1”.

At the end of the previous post, we'd come across a fallen utility pole, as we had a few times earlier....

The photo above is looking back toward where we'd come from, and in it there's a farmer leaning against a truck in front of his house. He'd told me that the road was not passable even by foot, but I'd dismissed it as an exaggeration. I shouldn't have.

What follows are a bunch of photos in chronological order, documenting what we came across....

This section that I had just come over was difficult, because not only was the road not visible, we were walking on branches that were well above the guardrail, itself not visible unless your foot fell through the web of branches and made a hole to look down and see it. The only path I could find was right over the guardrail at the edge of the cliff, so if you slipped in an unlucky way, you'd slice your foot on the top of the guardrail, or tumble down into the river.

At this point we met two workers walking from the other direction, and they helped John and Joshua with their bikes.

They said that they had been walking for an hour, and that there were maybe six or seven more almost-impassable sections like the one we were on. It turns out that this was wildly underestimated.

I'm guessing that the cut trees in the photo above are part of the massive damage from last year's Typhoon #21. The fallen utility pole and the slight landslide are from this year.

At times we faced such a daunting task to get past a section, we thought to turn back. But we knew how tough it would be to retrace our steps, and imagined that it couldn't be that bad going forward.

We were wrong.

We were stumped on how to get past this section when out from it came two guys...

They had found a long, low tunnel through the debris on the inside edge of the road, and so we dragged our bikes through it.

If that was their truck, the road was open from here on into the city. It had taken an hour and a half to travel about 4km (2.5mi), a stretch of road that normally takes just a few (~6 or 7) minutes.

We're lucky that there were no real landslides, as they can often take out a huge chunk of road, leaving absolutely no way to pass (such as seen here).

As it was we were lucky and could make it through. I was covered in scratched and bathed in sweat, and had lost the auto-retracting lens cap for my camera, a cleat cover, and ended up trashing my cleats. First world problems.

I imagine it'll be a long time before the road will be open.

On the way home, I swung by the Heian Shrine to see what had become of the tree that had fallen across the road the previous afternoon....

Here's the ride at Strava.