{"id":17811,"date":"2024-06-12T20:43:47","date_gmt":"2024-06-13T00:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/auto-draft\/"},"modified":"2024-06-12T20:52:23","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T00:52:23","slug":"change-of-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/cycling-travels\/cycling-asia\/south-korea-japan-2024\/change-of-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Change of plan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

During this segment, we slowly got back on our tandem saddles and only cycled two days. Like most first time visitors to Japan, we spent a fair number of days visiting Osaka, Nara, Kyoto as they were considered must-see destinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Although our original plan after returning from our one week stay in Italy was to continue cycling north on the main island of Japan, we opted to modify our cycling itinerary for several reasons. Firstly, we had recognized in our early planning that we would not be able to cycle the full length of Japan at our pace due to time constraint. Secondly, Japan’s humid summer weather had already started to be noticeable upon our return to Osaka. As the local Japanese typically find refuge from the torrid heat by visiting Japan’s most northern island: Hokkaido, we decided to leverage once again Japan’s extensive ferry service to fast track our cycling visit of the island of Hokkaido. Thirdly, finding a good location to wrap-up our cycling journey and easily flying out of Japan were very important to us. Taking another ferry from Hokkaido down the eastern coast of the main island of Honsh\u0169 would also allow us some more cycling days to finishing our journey in Tokyo with an extended visit of this unique city. And finally, with our shorten cycling itinerary days, it made it possible to include a 10-day (or so) visit of Shanghai on our way back home as we had not seen our family in China since the summer of 2018. The following map snapshots compare our initial and updated cycling itineraries.<\/p>\n\n\n