North of Shimada - Mar 4/08

Another rambling day of discovering roads. I headed west of town on roads I'd never been on, then turned onto what looked like a very squiggly road on the GPS and was in Strom heaven. These photos are all unretouched, I just batch resized them.

Lovely curvy road with no traffic, heading up over a low mountain pass. The roads were clear and in excellent shape for the most part.

Yes new fairing lowers are the wrong colour! Oh well, let's get the required bike photos out of the way.

Here's what you want to see right, the roads!

You can see some light debris on the road, but overall the roads were very clean in this section.

This road got very narrow in parts, but NO traffic made it fun.

Lovely green tea farms as usual up here. This is coming down the other side of the pass.

Here's a better shot of the green tea. I saw some farmers out getting ready to harvest some early green tea already!

Yes here you can see that I am up high and these low mountains are pretty. Although today was a bit hazy with no blue sky.

An interesting temple in the middle of nowhere. This road turned out to be a dead end, but it was fun.

This is the dead end road. You can see it's very narrow and covered with debris and small stones. Well ok, not so much here but take my word for it, some sections made me glad to have a VStrom.

Little water spout on the side of the road. I think likely this water was drinkable but I wasn't thirsty enough to try it.

Lots of little bridges used only by the farmers to get to the green tea plants across the creek.

I decided not to try going further up this road from here.

I love these little roads that follow creeks up the small valleys that are everywhere. There's some pretty waterfalls too.

And here's some early mountain cherry blossoms already blooming.

Lovely plum blossoms here with green tea in the background.

Here's two more types of mountain cherry blossoms in the same spot. That's it for today, hope you enjoyed the ride.

Here's today's track from GPS. You can see that these roads are not far from the city of Shizuoka. You can also see some of the dead end roads I took :-)