It took three months to circle Japan using bicycles and boats. To see everything using only a bike, it would take a whole year! Japan is deceptively large, and the 6,862 islands that make it up only add to the confusion. By the end of our trip the towns were starting to blur together, and the place names were lost to our memories as soon as we’d heard them (did we stay in Kyotango last night, or Shinosen?)

Because the county is rather expensive, we camped as often as we could, and this made for some extremely challenging travelling. Happily for us, convenience stores and public baths made everything a little more manageable. I didn’t post a day-to-day journal of the entire trip for numerous reasons, the most prominent of these being the fact that internet time was limited, and also that I didn’t want to bore people too much with the more mundane, day-to-day repetitious riding we did. Highlights not included here can be found on the ‘Japan’ page.

Map of the entire route:

Quick reference guide:

Okinawa loop
Kagoshima to Nagasaki
Nagasaki to Hiroshima
Hokkaido