Thanks to my fingers I didn’t get much sleep last night. We’re cycling uninspiring industrial coastal road into Chitose though, so I don’t feel too bad about the fact that all I can think of is my fingers. On the way we stop at a pharmacy and mange to get a mild steroid cream for me. It doesn’t help much.
We set up in a campground in urban Chitose, then try to find some more medical help. We end up at a pharmacy with a girl who phones her English teacher, who comes to the pharmacy to try and help. They are all lovely, and I go away with a numbing cream of some sort, which also doesn’t help. Tomorrow we’ll try the hospital.
Another night of not enough sleep thanks to fingers, and I spend all morning in search of, and at, the hospital. I come away with drained blisters, a stronger steroid cream, cotton gloves, and some lovely strong pain killers. We find some food in the city, I take my first pain killer, then we set off to the airport. I start slurring my words, and concentrate very hard on cycling.
As we arrive at Chitose Airport we say goodbye to the Boy, who keeps cycling south through the rest of Japan. We sit packing away our bikes into the Tardis bags, and our panniers into our low-rent stripy plastic bags, which are rapidly disintegrating. Check-in is fine (no excess luggage hurrah – we’re flying JAL, but through the oneworld Japan tickets), mosburger for dinner is tasty (my ‘bun’ consists of a fried rice patty, oh the tastiness), and the flight goes fine, spitting us out at Tokyo Haneda airport just as it is closing for the night. We can’t get to Narita tonight, but we need to be there first thing in the morning. It’s nearly midnight, and it seems pointless to try and sleep for the night. We store our luggage in lockers at a train station, and go wandering round central Tokyo.
Distance cycled 15th: 109km
Distance cycled 16th: 26km
Trip total: 1398km
Location: Shizunai – Chitose – Tokyo
3 replies on “day sixteen and seventeen – my fingers hurt, strong pain killers, and the flight to tokyo”
ah so that’s why your fingers were nicely hidden while you were here?
funny drying fish – at first i thought it was rack for shoes, until i read the description, lol… you must admit, if you imagine a little, a moroccan bazaar with some pointy sandals/shoes thingy, it looks quite like that :p
Yep, that’s why I was hiding them in the silly white gloves – thankfully no longer needed :)
And it does sort of look like a shoe rack thing – really, that’s much more likely thing to come across than a fish drying rack.
Someone else uses a Tardis – good stuff.