Tokyo is a fine city to explore but my plan was to stay in Kyoto, so the next hurdle was to get my bike to the Shinagawa train station and get on the Shinkansen to Kyoto. Originally I planned to ride to the station, but by the time I got my bike unpacked and put together it was getting late. I couldn’t figure out how to get the seat secured and nearly lost my mind trying to figure out. As well, I had to persuade the hotel staff to let me leave the cardboard bike box in the left luggage area, along with other sundry items I didn’t need.
The first man I asked at the reception was adamant I could not leave my box for a whole month. “Could I make it flat?” I asked, though there was some back and forth with what I meant. “Show me the box,” he said. Off I went back to the room to bring down the box. It was a different man at the reception by the time I got back and he was very accommodating. It’s comforting to know I have a bike box waiting when I have to get it on the plane. There was some uncertainty about how convenient it was to find an empty box at a Tokyo bike shop when it came time to leave.
When you take your bike on a train in Japan it has to be in a bag, not a box. Since I wasn’t going to ride to the station I needed to find a taxi that would be able to fit my now bagged bike. Any taxi I’d taken in previous visits to Tokyo were red little sedans, the Toyota Comfort brand, with strict, no-nonsense drivers who looked at you sternly as you loaded excess luggage into their pristine back seats.
The taxi culture has apparently changed in Tokyo, and likely Japan overall. Leaving the airport, I’d noticed cool looking vehicles which resembled squashed in black London cabs. The hotel staff, with the grumpy receptionist seemingly on an extended break, were again most accommodating in ordering me one of these. Thankfully, my bike fit in the back seat area and as he drove me to the station, I chatted happily with the driver within our mutually limited grasp of each other’s languages.
It wasn’t easy schlepping bikes and bags to the ticket counter and the platform for the train to Kyoto, but I made it. The worst part of the bike logistics were over.
Tokyo pavements
Moving people, cars and trains
Brilliant sun shadows
