Published in Kansai Time Out, Kyoto, Japan, February 1994.
Re-published in Oikaze #41, Cycling Newsletter, Tokyo, Japan, Spring 1994.

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"Rider houses" had become for me a kind of urban myth by the time I arrived in Hokkaido in the summer of '93 for a cycle tour. I was riding from the northern tip to the southeast port of Kusshiro, and I needed cheap places to stay.

Maizaru-Otaru Ferry

A friend returning from a cycling trip the previous summer said she'd heard of these unbelievably cheap "huts" for cyclists and bikers ("ra-i-da" or "rider" in japlish) along the desolate Okhotsk Sea Coast, but had never actually seen one.

I imagined a series of survival shacks hidden in the brambles of the Great Northern Wilds, and I wondered how you found one.

Dripping sweat over maps in the mid-summer Kyoto doldrums, I conjured up improbable images of pushing through snowdrifts, fighting frostbite and the Void when --THERE -- a beacon candle in the frosted window of a rough-hewn cabin where a circle of roughriders glowed in the warmth of hot sake and a crackling wood fire.

I toned down the adventure fantasies, a bit, after I read Bryan Harrell's Cycling Japan, which actually listed some names and phone numbers for the "extremely inexpensive" houses, which seemed to be located in towns. Still, Harrell's rider houses sounded like ephemeral cyclists' Nirvanas, where cheerfully drunken proprietors charged little or nothing for a place to stay, mountains of crab, lakes of trout stew and oceans of sake. Harrell said the best way to find them (besides his partial list) was to "look for makeshift signs along the side of the road," since new ones "pop up" all the time.