Nagasaki!

We had a great night at our "real" campsite, especially after the lovely hot bath - and chips with beer in the late evening sun. We left in the early morning and enjoyed the cooler part of the day with beautiful sunlight. Most of our ride would be on road 251, small with some traffic but quite pleasant, and 201 which was great. We were also able to find even smaller roads, always following the coast, with fantastic views, often with little or no traffic and not too much up and downs. We cycled through an onsen town - called Obama! - which was a special sight, with steam coming out of chimneys, pipes, drains, sewers, everywhere! By lunch we came across a small restaurant, went in, and it happened to be a lotus root restaurant. Yummy, we had a set lunch of dishes prepared with lotus roots!

Seaside scenery in the morning. The black fin coming out of the water near the orange buoy is someone fishing, not sure what he's fishing though

Steaming hot spring, with the typical sulphur smell included

The onsen village with steam everywhere

Riding next to the beach

After this lunch, the road became busier and hillier. Not long before Nagasaki, Google Maps gave us a nice itinerary through a town, avoiding a big road with heavy traffic. We are using Google Maps a lot again to plan our routes (maps.me is useless in Japan, suggesting insane routes), mostly using their walking directions but always double checking if it looks feasible by bicycle. This time, it was really nice, really feasible - until we were close to a bigger road we needed to join. Our small hillside road went up incredibly steep, so steep it was even hard to walk up with the bicycles. We got there, only to find our we were going through a short tunnel which seemed off limits for bicycles. We just ignored the sign, it wasn't entirely clear if it was meant for the tunnel anyway, and it was rather short too. After the tunnel, we ignored Google's walking directions - a way too small path with probably stairs on it - and basically rolled down into Nagasaki. We rode straight to our hotel where we'd meet Jan and Christine again, had to persuade the staff to park our bicycles inside (which they eventually found a solution for, they were really helpful), checked in, and enjoyed a great hot shower. Once our friends arrived we went to a bar nearby, had a couple of drinks, and then a tasty and cozy Japanese dinner - followed by another few drinks. It's so nice to enjoy good company!

Fantastic seaside cycling with incredible scenery

VERY steep uphill...

Good times in Nagasaki

In Nagasaki we had a rest day, which we used mostly to visit the memorial park and museum, commemorating the atomic bomb horror of August 1945. It was both incredible and confrontational, it made us all silent, it makes you realise how terrible and cruel war can be. 74.000 people died on the spot, and it's estimated that another similar number died afterwards. The impact of the bomb could even have been worse in a different setting - and today's nuclear weapons are even much more powerful than the one used in Nagasaki! It's impossible to describe what the pictures and explanations in the museum tell us, but the explosion must have caused a total hell on earth, and there's no doubt that nuclear weapons should be banned entirely and unconditionally.

The black column on the left is the hypocenter of the Nagasaki nuclear bomb explosion; the red brick wall remains on the right, are part of a church that stood 600m away from the hypocenter (and was later moved to the memorial site)

Colourful origami cranes, symbolising peace wishes

Inside the museum

After another very nice evening with great food and a couple of drinks in the same great company, and another good night in a real bed, we left Nagasaki this morning, while Jan and Christine left for Fukuoka from where they'll fly back to Belgium tomorrow. As we left late, we decided to make it a short day. I had found a seemingly nice campsite about 40km from Nagasaki and that's where we headed. Before going to the campsite, we visited a place called Port Hoorn, a small town built like an old Dutch town - not clear to us whether it's been built from scratch, or from actual existing buildings. We then cycled a few kms to our campsite, which was closed but accessible (again). In fact, there are 3 other tents with Japanese campers here as well, so maybe it's not even that unusual to use such closed campsites off season. This one even had warm showers (OK, we paid 100 JPY per 3 minutes for that, very much worth it). It's been drizzling a little bit this evening, apart from that it's a really beautiful campsite, even one of the best we've had so far!