walkabout-japan

Day 69
Epicentre...
GPS: N 37 °, 08.247 ' E 138 °, 45.776 '
Altitude: 137 m
Place: Tokamachi
Etmal: 29 km
Total: 1,592 km
After I have once again complained enough about the cold weather, I note that something is wrong with the geometry of the surroundings. After crossing the bridge, pictures of Escher comes into my mind. Nothing is like before, but however it works…
On the left side the slope has a dangerous bump and everything that should be straight is crooked. I'm completey terrified when arriving on a plateau on which they built a tunnel (exactly, a tunnel is built because of the snow banks in winter) through which I must go to. The road in the tunnel is uneven,
the sidewalk is broken and big metres long and bottomless holes comes out everywhere. Unfortunately, I become aware
of all this only when I'm alreaddy in the middle of it. Afterwards the road is repaired only provisionally. It looks like as if everything has moved and sunk about one meter to the right towards the river. The next village is completely destroyed:
the elemental power of an earthquake in October last year
has pressed this village in the truest sense of the word: epicentre. Ojiya, the town which comes next, shows everywhere tracks of this frightfully earthquake. From my camping place on the battered dyke, I'm looking through my binoculars at the road on the other side and this scenery sets me in a thoughtful mood: Over 200 m the mountain looks like as if it has been chopped with an axe... The street below has disappeared. It's raining once again...


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