Whee: A Bikepacking Journey Through the Japanese Alps

I am not a big believer in travel. At the beginning of this year, I remember sitting down with my therapist and saying that my relationship was on the ropes, my cat was sick, and the small medtech company I had worked at for the last five years had nine months of runway left. Eight months later, as I gingerly loaded my bike into a taxi, only the company remained, and the October paycheck I would receive whilst I was away was the last one they could guarantee. My source of income beyond that was up in the air.

However, this anxiety had been relegated to the back of my mind by the much more pressing anxiety of this trip. I tell you these things because I don’t want this story to be a man-escapes-from-his-disintegrating-life narrative. I did not book this trip instead of therapy. It took months of therapy to convince me I could book this trip.

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I should tell you how my preparation went. I had lists of lists of lists. I was meticulous. I did not turn up and realise I had forgotten to top up my tubeless sealant or fit new tyres. I spent months learning Japanese, running four lunchtimes a week, modifying the bike, studying maps, and making notes and bookmarks and maps. I rode multiple overnights to familiarise myself with my camping equipment. I researched and sourced improved gearing. I measured my disc rotor and my brake pad thickness with a caliper and checked them against the manufacturer’s recommendations to ensure they weren’t near failure.

I read articles about packing bikes, flying with bikes, reassembling bikes, bike boxes, and bike bags. I took my bike apart on my work stand in the lounge and test-loaded it into a cardboard box a week before I needed to leave. I don’t know about you, but time and time again, I have proved that when it counts and I am called to act in the heat of the moment, I will always lose my cool, make the wrong decision, panic, and fail. I have never learned how to fix this. All I’ve learned is mitigation and contingency. Lists and dry runs, double checks, and plans B through to D.

There were a few things I had deliberately left unplanned. I had booked my flights, my transfer to the airport, and my accommodations in Tokyo. I had a route and ideas about where I could stay, but the central structure of the trip, my daily mileage, my planned overnights, and almost everything about my return journey beyond its date was unknown to me. Partially, this was out of necessity. I didn’t know how far I could cycle in a day and had no idea what I would find on the road or what sights would arrest me. I knew that this trip was a blessing. Three weeks that terrified me but that I logically knew were safe, in which I could try and do something different.

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Every bike trip I had taken before had been planned down to the lunch stop. This time, I wanted to see how it would feel to improvise something like that. I touched down at Haneda, found my bicycle box already loaded onto a trolley and waiting for me, tried my Japanese on the customs officer who searched my luggage, bought a PASMO card for train and bus travel, and pushed my trolley out of the sliding double doors into the Japanese morning light.

In many ways, it was the bike itself that made the trip such a challenge for me. Ignoring the bike’s simple ability to propel you somewhere and then malfunction in such a way that it leaves you stranded, the added fetters of its assembly, disassembly and transportation placed me outside standard parameters. Questions like how to get to platform four became complex, multi-dimensional issues that couldn’t be answered by googling or reading a sign. Platform four could be up a flight of stairs, under the watchful eye of a diligent Japan Rail employee, or just really, really far away. None of these things are life-ending issues, but in the mind of the anxious person, not being able to say exactly what is going to happen in the next five minutes is enough to set up a whole sequence of physiological reactions that can result in collapse.

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In one sense, this made the bike a source of stress, but it was also a cold, heat-treated carbon steel comfort blanket. A familiar piece of home and a machine I knew enough to hope it wouldn’t let me down in any fatal way. When I pulled the disassembled frame out of its box on the airport tarmac, I knew the steps needed to rebuild it and how long they would take. I knew what tools I needed, where they were, and how they worked. In a world of unknowns, the repeatable can be a comfort.

That first morning riding into Tokyo had the familiar air of a new trip. Twenty-four hours ago, I was in my bed. Now, I was somewhere else entirely. Everything was interesting, even when it wasn’t. I followed the Tama River for longer than necessary; high up on the elevated path, I could see people playing team sports. Japanese people! Talking Japanese! Even later, when I was forced to head through the seemingly endless outskirts of the city and began my intimation with the gritty, stop-start nature of Japanese urban riding, the rush of novelty was enough to overwhelm any annoyance at having to wait at traffic lights every 500 metres.

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I met some Austrian weeaboo whilst trying to work out how to lock my bike, and together, we figured out the way you pay for off-street bike parking together. Taking multiple attempts to navigate the blinky fruit machine buttons and inscrutable voice prompts of the machine until it locked its mandibles around my front wheel. I walked into the first coffee shop that looked promising and ordered an espresso. They served it with sparkling water, and I sat on the bench outside the shop and sipped it. It tasted superlative. I had arrived.

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Seven days later, after the Tokyo roads had gifted me one slashed tyre, a two-day delay waiting for a new tyre to be fitted, and a train journey to try and make up for lost time, I was lying in my cold tent with a temperature. Running through the same fever dream for 12 hours with minor variations that always promised release but never granted it. If you’ve never had a fever dream, they operate like a fractal or a descending shepherd scale you can’t stop thinking about. The repeated sensation of moving deeper and deeper into an infinite complexity, whilst all you want to do is get out. Like being trapped in a small space with a song stuck in your head that you can’t stop singing. Between the dreams, I would wake up and try to reassure myself that they weren’t real. In one of these tussles with consciousness, I told myself that if I had embarked on this trip with a plan, I would have been behind schedule. But as I had no plan, none of this mattered. No plan is the most durable plan of all.

The fever didn’t break overnight, and the next day, I tried to climb a mountain. What else was there to do? I live in Cambridge, England. A mirror-flat county in a country not known for its mountain ranges, and although I had a conceptual understanding that climbing would affect my daily progress, I had underestimated how much of a toll it would take. That or the fever. Twenty kilometres into what I thought would be an easy 50-kilometre first day, I was cooked.

I had half walked, half pedaled my way up a mountain pass alongside the exhaust fumes of day trippers in coaches, motorbikes, and rear-wheel-drive coupes. I sat down in the sun next to Lake Chuzenji and wondered what I thought I was doing. It was possible I had done something I’ve done many times in my life: made a mistake. Maybe I was overpacked and under-conditioned. Maybe people like me couldn’t do things like this. The exact description of what “a person like me” was eluded me. Someone with shakey legs and a chill that didn’t go away regardless of how much my body was overheating. I booked into a campsite four kilometres away, set my tent up, ate as much food as I could stomach, and lay down at 6 p.m. to try and get any rest that I could. I didn’t sleep, but the fever dreams at least stayed away. I woke at 6 a.m. to rain. Rain was something I understood. If I’m a type of cyclist, I’m a commuter. Commuters don’t get the day off when the weather is bad.

As I continued to climb the pass, the trees turned autumnal. Orange leaves floated on sheets of water that parted around my front tyre. The 12 hours I had spent lying in my tent, unable to sleep, had restored me somewhat. I was covering ground and gaining elevation at almost double the pace of yesterday. But as I crested the pass, I learned of a new dimension to rain. I was familiar with riding in wet weather, but had never experienced rain whilst descending a mountain. In truth, I had never descended a mountain before. Every item of clothing I wore, which was previously damp, now became frigid. Within a few minutes, my feet were numb, and my hands responded to critical instructions like “pull the brake lever” with shooting pains up to my elbows.

The irony of how beautiful this mountain descent would feel in almost any other weather began to gnaw at me. The switchbacks crept by until I found refuge in an off-season ski resort. I squelched inside, and with shaking hands, I wrung my socks into the bathroom sink and purchased a vending machine coffee (vile), two portions of fries (eaten with chopsticks) and one of grilled rice balls, the only two vegetarian menu items.

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I assessed the situation. Outside, brightly coloured figures zig-zagged down a baize green artificial ski slope. They took off their helmets and strode indoors in their clunky ski boots. They seemed wealthy and vigorous. I was damp and sick. The rain wasn’t going to stop within the next four hours, by which time it would be dark. I had travelled 20 kilometres and was a third of the way down a 2,000-metre descent. My socks were wet. I had underestimated how much colder it would be at altitude. I was on holiday. The ski resort had an onsen where I could take a shower and sit in a hot mineral water bath for an hour. I went to the onsen and sat in the steaming rust-coloured water. Cycling was not the point of the trip, I told myself, ignoring a nude elderly man performing callisthenics. The point of the trip was the trip itself.

For the past few months, I had consciously told myself various logical things, trying to convince a part of my psyche that didn’t respond to logic. It felt as though within my mind was a character I referred to as “Disapproving Boss,” intuitively unhappy with my approach to everything and unwilling to listen to my reasoning. I had told Disapproving Boss that the trip was nothing to get anxious about. I was a middle-aged man who had built and ridden bikes for years, armed with a credit card and Google Translate. But Disapproving Boss didn’t listen, and for weeks preceding my flight, I would have anxiety dream after anxiety dream. Dreams where I forgot my bicycle, or became lost in the mountains, or missed a train, or had my passport stolen. My current sickness felt like another symptom of my overstressed nervous system. Boiling in cortisol for too long, it had finally sent the signal to give up. I told myself to go with the flow. This was the trip; nothing was perfect. I was incalculably blessed to be here, nude and submerged in mineral water from a mountain spring on the other side of the world.

My affirmations didn’t convince Disapproving Boss that day, but slowly, they began to take effect. I checked into my accommodation and painstakingly Google translated my vegetarian requirements to my elderly host. She typed something into her phone. “If you don’t eat meat, what do you eat?” it said on her behalf whilst she looked at me in consternation. We persevered, both of us tapping our side of the conversation into our devices. For dinner, she served me rice, mushrooms, and aubergine. The next day, I was healed. The mountain passes, which had me off my bike and pushing, became difficult but surmountable. My daily mileage increased in a way that surprised me over and over. I began to understand what I wanted to eat from convenience stores. I developed an intuitive understanding of how to use the bicycle parking payment stations that had confused me and the Austrian on my first night. I asked strangers for help.

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I never got the hang of the bears. Everywhere in the mountains were signs warning of bears, at almost every campsite. Beware of bears. But no information was available on how to beware of bears. I had a bear bell, which I read was not actually proven as a deterrent, but it seemed to be the extent of Japanese bear defence technology. The signs mostly stressed me out. They always seemed to be most prevalent at abandoned camping spots, where I felt a bear would certainly try sniffing me out, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do. I would fall asleep in my sleeping bag listening to podcasts and trying my best to beware.

I did get the hang of onsens, which surprised me; I’ve never been particularly calm in changing rooms or swimming pools. I didn’t expect such inhibitions to cut loose so quickly, but I suppose it speaks to the power of culture. Soon, they became an essential part of my touring routine. I found myself at home, even in small rural ones that only accepted cash. There were loads of rules about onsens, but they were printed and stuck on the wall. You could read them and internalise them, and once you’d done that, you at least knew you weren’t breaking any. I was only worried once when a man started talking to me whilst soaking. I assumed I had flaunted some minor etiquette and was being reprimanded, but after a beat or two, I managed to translate what he was saying. He was asking about the bicycle outside. Was it mine? I don’t want to understate how rudimentary my Japanese was, but I had just enough to understand this conversation and tell him where I was going and where I was from. He told me he had cycled to Kyoto once, a long time ago, and we grinned at each other.

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In many ways, I would be the first to admit that I don’t know how to have fun. My life has always been more about maintaining an equilibrium than chasing euphoric peaks, and I’m thankful for my ability to do that. A life of ups and downs makes for good copy but doesn’t look like much fun to live. Over the 14 days I cycled around, I began to feel like I knew how to maintain an equilibrium. The Disapproving Boss quieted his more brutal retaliations. I began to relish the comprehensive nature of my packlist and equipment. When I stopped in a town, I would remove my bike luggage and cycle around unencumbered, walking into cafes and bike shops, starting up conversations with anyone who had enough English for us to converse. I was in a foreign land and a foreign culture, but in many ways, the days began to take on the same shape as my best days at home. Me and my bike, riding around and making new friends, but shifted into a new context.

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On my last day, I was staying in a hostel in Shibuya. My bike was locked down the street. I needed to get a gigantic cardboard bike box from another part of Tokyo, disassemble my bicycle, pack it into the box, get the boxed bike back to Haneda airport, and then from Heathrow airport back to Cambridge. In contrast to my meticulously planned outward journey, there had been no way to plan this return. I had no workshop, no pre-booked taxi, no place to store the box or the boxed bike. I didn’t know if I would be able to carry the box onto a train by myself. The trains from London to Cambridge weren’t running. The coaches couldn’t confirm that they would accept a boxed bike. I had no plan but didn’t feel so bad. I had this weird feeling, an alien feeling, that it would all be okay. And it was. I boxed the bike in the street, stored the box next to my hostel bed, emailed a cab company and told them the time to pick me up, and loaded the box into the back of the car, took the plane, talked to the bus driver, booked a taxi and another. I had done it.

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There were many times in the trip when the bike felt a burden. At train stations, I watched unladen passengers effortlessly board whilst I hobbled across the platform with my partially dismantled bike on one shoulder and the rest of my luggage over the other. But the version of the trip without my bike, even with a rented bike, wouldn’t have come close. At least the Japanese understand the importance of objects. So many of us try to invoke some primacy of experience. A deranged concept. What makes one experience any better than another? They can’t even be grasped or studied, let alone compared. At least an object can be picked up, spun around, held against, and then judged superior to another.

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Before my trip, people asked me if I was going to rent a bike. No one in Japan would ask that. If you didn’t take your personal bike to Japan, you would never ride it down the sharply graded descents of the mountainous Hakone region. I’m embarrassed to say it took me so long to realise I was so privileged that I could buy this feeling. The experience of which is the closest thing a short-sighted, anti-war krelboyne like me is going to get to flying their own personally selected, upgraded, serviced, modified, trauma-bonded, and stickered-up F-18 Super Hornet through an infinite Sega arcade accurate CRT blue sky. Fully embodied as you feather the brakes and lean against the camber. For kilometre after kilometre. Nothing to do and nowhere to be. Freehub pawls tinkling like a Swiss watch made by an alien from a planet with no gravity and no atmosphere. Your people have a word for it in your language, don’t you? I never learned to say it with my own voice, but I learned to spell it. I can write it here for you now: Whee!

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