ATMs AND MANGA CAFEs

160km

I can only sum it up by saying crap day, still a crap day on holidays is better than the best day at work!!

During the whole preperation of this trip (the massive 5 weeks of planning) most of the time I had to try and do 5 things at once e.g. prepare the bike, organise the paperwork, guess what spare parts to take.. etc. etc. Which is easy enough, most of us do this sort of thing in every day life. Work out what is most important and work backwards from there. Sometimes it`s difficult when EVERYTHING is important and you have a short amount of time, but it can be done. All this is helped along by normally having someone around you can have a laugh about the hard times with, having had a good nights sleep and having eating decent meals every day.....

BUT, when you have just tryed to slept in the Japanese equilivent of a brothel without hookers, have a small problem with the language (massive understatment) and have been living on servo food for the last few days it makes things a little more difficult. Which arrives at the exact reason that I love travelling by myself...the personal challenge is better than you can ever try and replicate in normal life. Simple things are easily made REALLY difficult. Heres what I wanted to do...

Find a place to sleep in Suzuka, I really wanted to see this round of the Japanese touring cars, but..

I needed to put fuel in the bike, it was really low and I wasn`t really keen on pushing it around fully laden in the 40 degree heat looking for a servo, but....

To do this I needed money due to most places not really accepting credit cards, I also needed money to get into the touring cars...

So I went on a search for an ATM that would accept my Aussie cards, spent half a day and way too much fuel to find that Suzuka does not have one!! (It probably does and if you know where it is, keep it to yourself, because I don`t care anymore), so I put 20l of fuel in the bike and decided to go to kyoto where I knew there was a Citibank ATM that I could get money from...

Then I got pissed off and changed my mind, I couldn`t leave Suzuka without seeing some Japanese touring cars, so I went to a Internet/Manga cafe I had spotted on my ATM search. These places are awsome, you get your own personal little booth thing that I had heard you could stay the night in if you wanted given that most are open 24 hours. I wasn`t too sure about this but by the amount of snoring going on when I walked in I guessed the rumours were all true. Problem still being I was unsure that I had even enough money to spend the night here, so i spent a couple of hours fruitlessly trying websites that might list ATMs in Suzuka. Gave up and left there to once again look for some sort of place to stay that wasn`t booked out, I`d already tryed several hotels, a camping ground, a love hotel....anywhere that might take a credit card and not be booked out.

I had given up on Suzuka about midnight and started to make for Tsu (not far from Suzuka) when I noticed something flapping loose on the bike in my own shadow thrown from the street lights. I pulled over to notice that the straps that hold my top bag (donated by D.K., thanks D.K!!) were loose and the top bag had gone!!! (Sorry D.K!!) My only guess is that my fatigue and stupidity had led me to leave the straps loose when I had left the Internet Cafe.... more proof that you should work out where you are staying before midnight each night. It was all starting to get a bit stupid now, I was HEAPS tired and doing stuff like that was something that I normally didn`t do, being almost obsessive/compulsive about checking my bike before take off.

I counted up what money I had left and decided to go back to the internet cafe, get some sleep and work out what to do tomorrow. I guessed from the signs that I could get 6 hours there (nobody spoke English of course), this would put me at around 7am, good enough for me. It looked to me that this would be about $A14, I had $A16 left so it should all be fine........