February 5th, 3pm, After a whole night of packing, my backpack was finally ready with its 85L !
The trip officially started and I left my house in Tokyo heading to the expressway.
As hitchhiking isn’t common in Japan, I had to reach the entry of the Expressway in order to catch some car. Regarding that standing in the middle of a Highway is forbidden here, I had to start thumbing up from a Service Area (SA). These places are usually crowded and Japanese drivers always stop by whether to check the weather news or just to have a break.
At 5pm I reached the Kohoku Parking Area in Yokohama, not that much traffic but enough to got picked up after 1 hour.
My driver although offered me a ride only till the next Service Area (20 km) but he was very nice. He was a banker and after dropping me offered me some nuts and… 10’000 Yens !!!! Yeah, seems he liked the way I was travelling and wanted to encourage ! 😀

Arrived at Ebina SA at 7pm, I had to wait only for 20 minutes till a guy stopped and invited me in. He was a hardware engineer going home. We shared a 130 km ride till Shizuoka.

Then at around 9pm30, from the Parking area I was in, an old Japanese driver came to me and asked to join him and his friend. He was a truck driver but his friend was driving a nice BMW. And I found out that the other guy was a businessman from Lebanon !! He was in Japan for buying cars in order to sell them in his home country and he was so surprised to meet me !
The 190km till Nagoya were so nice since we were having a conversation in Arabic about the political and social situation of our countries!!
Although the Lebanese guy invited me to spend the night at the office of his company and have rest to pursue my way in the morning, I insisted to be left in a Parking so that I can reach my destination Kyoto as soon as possible.

One hour and half passed, and I was still sitting in the large parking were most of drivers seemed sleeping inside their trucks. At that moment I was freezing and decided to write “Kyoto” in big letters so that it catches more the attention of drivers, and it worked !!
An old Japanese stopped his truck and said “Kyoto ?”, I felt so happy, one, because I was finally going to escape from cold and second, because I will reach destination early in the morning.

I arrived in Kyoto at 3am30 after 130km and was left in Otsu SA. It was so freaking cold and had no other choice than sitting down and waiting for morning inside.
At 8am I decided to take metro and sightsee around the city. But, there was a problem, there was no way out of the Service Area and I couldn’t just cross the expressway to reach the metro station from the other side. So my only option was… Hitchhiking again !!
And it took me only 5 minutes until a family invited me to join them for their one day trip in Kyoto. They were from Gifu.
although I was extremely tired since I didn’t had sleep during 3 days, I really had good time with them sightseeing around the downtown.

at 5pm, I headed to the house of my host in Kyoto and what a nice sleep I had… 12 hours in a row!! But the rest wasn’t for longer time… it was already Friday… meaning 2 days left to leave the country before my visa expires…