Shimanami Kaido

Well well well, it sure has been a long time. I have no real excuse and unfortunately missed out on sharing a lot of things with the people who read this. Back in April I went to Israel, and that was awesome. In May, I traveled around Japan and finally got to go to a place I had been waiting to see for a long time: Beppu. It's known for its sheer number of hot springs in such a small area. Every city block seemed to have a spa. But today I'm going to talk about something that happened a little more recent.

A few weekends ago there was a big charity bike ride that many of the foreign language teachers decided to join. This was an event I had been looking forward to for a long time as it would feature some beautiful scenery of western Japan. The Shimanami highway connects the main island of Japan, called Honshu, to another called Shikoku. In the meantime, you cross over several smaller islands. The bike route is about 77 km, so a little under 50 miles. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I'd like to think the group I rode with took our time with plenty of breaks and were still one of the first to finish. It was an awesome way to spend a Saturday as we trekked across these bridges and islands.

The body of water in between Honshu and Shikoku is called the Seto Inland Sea and it is filled with probably hundreds of these tiny little islands.

Once we arrived at our destination, many of us had signed up to stay at a Japanese inn and enjoy a nice relaxing dinner. Here I got a chance to talk to all the slowpokes that were finally rolling into the inn. I was a little surprised to see how far people had come for this trip. During the Naked Man festival I knew some people came from prefectures in central Japan. That would have been about a 3 hour trip by bullet train. But this time we had someone come as far as Tohoku, close to the northern island of Hokkaido.

Also, most of the people that were in this bike ride were teachers from the JET program. The bike ride was hosted by JET since they organize most of the big group activities for foreigners here in Okayama prefecture. Anyway, a lot of the people from outside of Okayama were surprised to learn I was not a JET but participating in a JET event. And that's when I learned how fortunate I was to be placed here in Okayama. During the Naked Man festival, some of the people making the trip to Okayama talked about how cool it was that we included people from other regions of Japan to join. I didn't think much of it at the time, but after this trip I realized that the Okayama JET group is more of an exception when it comes to including everyone. Other prefectures' JET programs seem to be much more exclusive and only invite other JETs for their events.