Itoshima 2019: The 8-hour cycling adventure begins

On my second full day in Itoshima I’d spend most of my time cycling around the Itoshima Peninsula. My rental bicycle (pictured above) didn’t have a basket to hold my daypack but it had six gears, which allowed me to move quickly and I covered a lot of ground that day. Itoshima doesn’t have that much in the way of traditional tourist attractions but it has a lot of nice scenery and bicycling is a great way to experience this part of Japan.

I got my rental bicycle from a shop just west of Chikuzen-Maebaru Station called Furukawa Yamaha. Originally my plan had been to rent a bicycle from the tourism office next to Chikuzen-Maebaru Station but they were out of bicycles that morning and the staff directed me instead to this shop. My all-day rental cost only 1,000 yen and I’d have the bicycle for about 8 hours until I needed to bring it back. The elderly couple who run Furukawa Yamaha don’t speak English but renting a bicycle is a simple process and we were able to understand each other well enough. To rent a bicycle here (and in other parts of Japan) you need to write a Japanese phone number on the rental form and I wrote down the phone number of my Airbnb house. The bicycle I got from Furukawa Yamaha was in really good condition and I wrote a 5-star review for the shop on Google Maps that will hopefully be helpful to other English speakers that are looking for a place to rent a bicycle.

Once I had my bicycle I started cycling north. The scenery goes from urban to rural very quickly and I soon found myself cycling along farmland. After a short while I turned west and headed for the coast. At the mouth of a river there were a few boats sitting on the land, waiting for whenever they would next be taken out to sea. A minute later I was alongside the ocean following the coastal road.

As I was cycling along the coast I stopped a couple times and went down to the water’s edge. The Itoshima Peninsula has a lot of small sandy beaches like the ones in today’s photos and if I had more time I would have stopped at all of them.