This particular ride was canceled due to rain, so I was really looking forward to the makeup a week later. Didn’t know exactly where we were going, but I knew that it wouldn’t be at a hellish pace because the old ladies were coming along.
We departed at 8:30 from the Bike Shop, and if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t a hair over 40 degrees. I had a ski mask, earmuffs, and scarf on underneath my helmet as well as double layers everywhere else, and I was cooking. I took off half the stuff and jammed it into the pockets of my heavy jacket, right next to a small bottle of sake that I was told to bring along to keep warm.
We took back roads all the way up to Tosa-Yamada, a town I had been to several times before to watch baseball games. We passed a little patch of land peppered with every vegetable imaginable. It was just a quarter-acre among thousands of acres of farmland, and nothing was special about it except the variety of produce. Cabbage, ginger, carrots, radishes, broccoli, tomatoes, pumpkins, several different types of onions, and the list goes on.
We waited for the old folks in front of this plot, and I didn’t read the sign until we had started up again. It threw me for a loop, so I turned around and read it again:
Pick-It-Yourself Market!
Grab a basket from out back and load it up with whatever you want!
Drop the money in the bucket!
Enjoy the fruits of the labor of your land!
I thought that was a pretty cool variation of the Honesty Market and said so out loud. It was here that Mr. Bike Shop would drop his first gem of the day:
“I don’t think that they are free.”
We met a large group at a temple in Tosa-Yamada and wheeled off for some museum on the Monobe River. I didn’t really care where we were going, it was just nice to be outside and with people after spending last weekend alone at home watching the rain. I spoke mostly with another foreign fella in the club, and he was giving me plenty of reasons to stay in Kochi for another year.
It really is a wonderful place. For being the toughest winter I’ve ever experienced, it isn’t bad at all. Aside from the crappy apartment buildings and having to defend yourself against the cold all hours of the day, it’s totally doable in Kochi.
Broken record time: the scenery and nature are just amazing. I looked at the Monobe River, the sky, the trees, and the road and I got so excited about it that it took a physical toll by the end of the day.
We continued upstream, crossing the river on iron bridges several times. These bridges were constructed with see-through steel grating where asphalt would normally be, so we were afforded views beneath as well as above and of all sides!
The museum was in there somewhere, but it was under construction and I was too busy trying to appreciate everything I had been seeing all day. Most riders headed home on their bikes from the museum, but Mr. Bike Shop coerced us into going “just 6 miles farther” to a hot spring that he knew of.
I still haven’t learned how to speak Mr. Bike Shop’s language. He said it would take “1 hour plus alpha,” to which I asked what the hell this alpha business was all about.
He said, “Relax, alpha is just some undetermined amount of time. It’ll probably be like an hour and a half.”
Over two hours and about 12 miles later, we arrived at the Sasa Hot Spring, nestled in a canyon beneath Three Peaks.
I’m beginning to think that Mr. Bike Shop talks the way he does on purpose and that his distances and times are latent challenges. Maybe when he’s duping me into doing something I wouldn’t have done if I knew the truth, what he’s really doing is saying, “See? Didn’t know you could go that far, did you?”
Back to Sasa Hot Spring and Three Peaks. We dismantled our bikes and put them atop the Bike Shop’s van, which their daughter had driven in order to meet us and take us home. We entered an A-frame building made of logs, complete with a smoking chimney.
This would be my first hot spring with the bike club, and I was looking forward to it. Six guys, including me, piled into the tiniest bathhouse dressing room I’ve seen since I’ve been here.
It didn’t get much better as I stepped through the curtain and into what I can honestly call a bath-room. Most hot springs are resort-like, with rows upon rows of squat showers, saunas, and Turkish baths. This place was just a bit bigger than my bedroom.
Three sets of spigots, not shower heads, stuck out of the wall about 18 inches off the ground. Icy water spurted from the hot water spigot and I did my best not to gag at the hideous odor of sulfur when the hot water finally came out.
And the bath - it was a wooden tub about the size of a couple of coffins put together. It looked like a gigantic sake box, and the hot spring water trickled into it from a single bamboo reed resting on one corner.
I had dallied getting naked and showered, so I had the unenviable task of squeezing between middle-aged men who were already positioned, very comfortable, and very naked. I got in and the displaced water whooshed over the side, much to the delight of the other guys. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in and I weigh about what I did in high school, but you can still pinch more inches of me than you could of them.
Rub-a-dub-dub, six men in a tub. We were able to relax, but quarters were cramped. Mr. Bike Shop started telling me about his first trip ever overseas, to Los Angeles about 20 years ago. He’s a good story-teller and he had me leaning closer and closer, trying to get the best earful possible.
His left eyebrow shot up, and he gave me a sly look and said, “Wait a minute, Mac. Check this out!”
His left hand was fishing around for something in the murky water, and I choked at the thought of what it could be. What was this crazy old dude about to show me?
He cocked a grin and slowly raised a One-Cup Sake bottle out of the bath. He peeled back the lid, giggling, and gave a toast to an imaginary partner.
After three seconds plus alpha, I exploded in laughter so deep and hard that it hurt. Mr. Bike Shop is a tricky fella, he certainly knows how to take a kid for a ride.