Day 10: Matsumoto to Narai: Into the Kiso Valley

October 18, 2007

This was a short, physically easy cycling day. We spent the morning exploring Matsumoto a bit further, and then set out to the southwest to Narai, at the northern end of the Kiso Valley. The ride was short, essentially flat, but slow and stressful because most of it was along busy route 19. For the last half of the ride there was no option to the highway, so we were stuck with making the best of it. It was a terrible ride really - there was far too much traffic to ride on the road itself, so we rode primarily on its sidewalk, which was hardly bike friendly either. Making things more frustrating still, the sidewalk was on one side of the highway only and every few miles it would switch sides, so we were periodically forced to brave the traffic flow and cross over.

Narai itself made a wonderful stay though, once we arrived. It was a post town in the Edo period, positioned about half-way between Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo), and has a very well preserved collection of traditional houses - essentially the entire main street of the town consists of historical wooden houses from an era long gone.

Narai was the town where our careful advance planning ran up against its limits. We had three-fold protection against our lack of Japanese language skills: advance reservations, so that we were expected; the GPS, to hopefully take us to the exact block of our lodging; and a hard-copy picture of the place downloaded from the inn's website, so that as a last resort we could match it against the options before us.

Narai thwarted this though because every building on the street looked essentially the same, and like a candidate match to our picture. Other than for the stores, any of them looked as likely as not to be an inn. Worse yet, we couldn't find anyone in town that spoke any English at all. Eventually we succeeded with a patient storekeeper by using pantomime and showing him the characters on our printed excerpt from the website, and with relief we were directed to our room and welcomed in by our hostess.

Narai, an Edo-era post town. Somewhere on this street of look-alike structures was our inn.

Scott, sipping from one of the town's fountains.

Today's ride: 25 miles (40 km)
Total: 375 miles (604 km)

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