I’d been wanting to do the ride from Nagoya to Kyoto for a long time, but just kept procrastinating and not making any plans to do it. That is, until now! My friend and old cycling teammate from Detroit, Kroske, was visiting Japan for a week with his son, and they were thinking to stop in Kyoto for a day via the shinkansen bullet train.
I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to finally try out the ride from Nagoya to Kyoto (which is about 150 km).
I just bought a new bike rack for my road bike with the goal of doing some more longer adventure type rides. The problem though was that I didn’t yet have any pannier bags, and didn’t really want to spend more than $100 on a… bag… So I made my own easy and cheap solution using Japan postal service bags, which are waterproof! I was able to tie it to my rack using some shoelace, and it luckily held up for my whole trip!
I left a couple hours before sunrise so that I wouldn’t be stuck riding in the Summer heat under the sunlight for too long. A good portion of the route I took was just along lake Biwa (Japan’s largest lake), so it wasn’t too bad of a ride.
I definitely noticed a difference in the weight of the bike though, which made me a bit more tired than I usually would be after a 150km bike ride.
Anyway, I finally made it to Kyoto, where Kroske, his son and I went around a couple of the popular tourist spots.
Since they were heading back to Tokyo that evening via shinkansen bullet train, I decided to continue on and ride to Osaka to visit another one of my friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while.
Again, I spent most of my riding time while the sun was down, which was a lot easier and cooler than riding during the daytime. Fortunately, the ride to Osaka from Kyoto is quite simple and I mainly just had to follow a nice river cycling path most of the way.
One of the nice things about summer cycling in Japan is that it is still warm at night, so it’s easy (and free!) to do hammock style camping.
I fueled up with some breakfast at a local convenient store and then was off to see my friend, though my real motive was to see her dogs and take them for a walk 🙂
I originally was planning on riding back to Nagoya from Osaka, but the weather was looking like rain for most of the time, and I didn’t really want to ride 200+ KM back home in the rain, so I decided to take the shinkansen back home.
Nagoya to Kyoto & Osaka VLOG
You can watch the full video from this trip here
Cycling Route Details
Here are the routes that I took
Nagoya to Kyoto
https://www.strava.com/activities/642406661
Kyoto to Osaka
https://www.strava.com/activities/642820226
