Japanese Roren: Riding along on my push bike honey, along the Kibi Plains!!

23rd November

Today was a national holiday so we decided to finally go on the Kibi Plains bike tour. We have been meaning to do this for sometime but we never really had found a good time to do it but today was perfect – it was sunny but not hot and there were plenty of autumn leaves around. Tina, Steve, Marie, Shinya and I hired a car and we left the driving up to Shinya! We arrived at the station where you hire the bikes, got our map and headed off on the 3-4 hour round trip bike tour! It was a beautiful ride which went through rice fields, along rivers and bypassed temples, pagodas and shrines. We stopped for a nice picnic lunch prepared by Tina outside a temple. The ride didn’t take too long but we couldn’t resist stopping to look at the temples and shrines and of course to take many photos!! It was a great day and I really recommend taking a day to go on this bike ride!

All of us on our bikes!

The scenery on our ride

Kokubunji Temple in the distance and the pagoda in the temple grounds, this is where we had lunch.

5 storey pagoda

The pagoda with beautiful red autumn leaves

This looked beautiful - old gravestones and the amazing yellow tree and bright red berries. Shinya told us that these are actually unnamed graves or people with no families, so although it was beautiful it was also sad.

In the Okayama area Momotaro (peach boy) is a famous folk tale about a boy who was born from a peach and goes out and fights demons and saves the world! I love peaches and I think it is a great story! I bought a phone charm from Kibitsu shrine which is a peach and if you look through a tiny hole you can see Momotaro! There were a pictures of him at the shrine, this one is of him being born!