For Swift Campout 2023, we closed all the stores, except for the Hatagaya store and went on a trip. We made a few teams out of the 50 plus staff members and all the teams went on different adventures.

Here’s the report of my team. The Hachijojima Island Team.

We needed to take a ferry to reach Hachijojima Island, so our journey starts with a late night ride to the terminal on the day before the big day. I made the departure to the first destination with a small amount of anxiety, since it was right after work and I was worried if hadn’t forgotten anything for the trip.


Shami from the Kamiuma store was coming with us, so we rendezvoused at Route 246. It’s really weird to think that the island we’re headed is still a part of Tokyo.

Heading to Takeshiba Passenger Boat Terminal while having Tokyo Tower to our left.

You will need to fill in a few forms and hand your bikes to the boarding attendants, so I highly recommend you to arrive early. (obviously)

This was my very first trip to an island, so I wasn’t so sure of the process I needed to go through, but I had some experienced island travelers on my team, so I was able to hand my bike to them. The attendants are there to transport your bikes, not your luggage, so you will need to take off most of the bags that are attached to your bike.


Aaand we are in!Now, that the ferry has departed, it’s time to go watch our boat pass under the Rainbow Bridge.

Psych! We just got done working, so we were too hungry to care about a bridge. Asahi is a quiet dude, so I thought him eating shrimp fry curry was cute. (*shrimp fries are considered as a kids menu in Japan)

(I did take a picture from the cafeteria window tho)


Bunk beds are cool.  I don’t know what it is but they make me excited.
It takes 10 hours for the ship to reach Hachijojima, so we rented the small rooms you seen in the picture, to get a nice rest. Since I had finished a long day of work, I was sleeping like a log, in about an hour into the ferry ride. Mucho was ready to party but everyone was so tired, he could spend a fun night. I’ll never forget his sad face.

We departed the terminal at 10:00p.m. and arrived at Hachijojima Island at 8:00 a.m. As the ferry approached the island, I was still sleeping like a log.

Here we are. “I’ll go ahead and take pictures of you guys getting off the ferry!” Mucho, the oldest member of the team rushes out the ship like a little kid. He looked like he was having fun in this whole trip, so I thought that was pretty nice.


There’s our bikes. It was cool that we didn’t have to re-assemble our bikes in the morning.

Alright, let’s load the bags onto our bikes again. Shami is becoming an expert at bikepacking. I’m a little bit jealous.

Oh yeah, we met one of our customers on the island! Never thought I’d see a Surly Bike built by Kaneyan in Hachijojima Island!
After we lined up our bikes and took some photos, as if we were a group of teenagers, it was time to start pedaling.

Thank you! Salvia-Maru!

The road on the island reminded me a lot of Sakurajima in Kagoshima. There’s only a few cars and it feels really good to ride. There’s paved road throughout the whole island, so you could ride around the entire island. I believe it’s only about 60km in total. (we didn’t ride the whole way around on this trip though.)


Here’s a picture of the local supermarket we went frequently throughout the trip. Apologies for writing so much about food, but their pastries were amazing.

Here’s our camp, Hachijojima Plaza. A camping spot where we can see the Mt. Hachijo-Fuji. We were the only guests, which was really nice.

We set up our tents and it finally started to look like a camping trip. Now, for some fun bike rides!

We left our heavy loads in the tent and went on an adventure. We took the route through the forest trail and headed to the hot spring. I didn’t know this but Hachijojima has a ton of hot springs, and our plan was to visit two spots, out of the many.


After checking the route, we let the pedaling begin. It was my first time riding with the dudes, besides Shami, so I was pretty excited. (Yes, we went riding without our camping gear on our bikes and yes, this is supposed to a bikecamp, please don’t give us shit for leaving the gear in our camp.)

We had planned on going to a hot spring, but Asahi forgot his change of clothes, so he got a new shirt at the local souvenir store. I gave him one of my undies btw.

Surf’s up.

Now that he got himself a brand new shirt, let’s hit up the first hot spring shall we?
But before that, we needed to do a lot of climbing. And I mean a lot of climbing…

These 10% hills appear constantly throughout the ride.

We climbed and climbed…

But there’s always a prize to climbing hills. Can’t deny this view. It’s nothing we can see in the city for sure. The view itself is quite stunning, but we still wanted to get to the hot spring. (There were more climbing and descending, but I don’t want to remind myself the pain, so I’m not gonna write about it.)

And here we are at the first spot. The “Uramigataki Onsen”. This hot spring is free to enter. You’ll need some kind of bathing suites to get in. It’s apparently one of the local’s favorite spots.

This is a mixed bathing hot spring, but we were the only guests.

After a long climbing, the hot spring felt AMAZING, especially with this crazy view of the waterfall. I honestly wanted to go back to camp at this point, but we had keep moving.

Now for the trail. We headed to the “Higashiyamasen-rindo”. (Yes, we did the same amount of climbing and descending as the last run) This trail is apparently a famous spot, so my expectations were high.

A lot of gravel, a lot of mud and a lot of bushwacking. It was such a fun trail to ride. There was no disappointment at all.

I wore sandals and this is what my feet ended up looking.

This was not a trail to ride with slick 42B tires with fenders, but I made it through so it’s all good. (I got so much mud between the tires and fenders, which was awesome)

FYI, there’s absolutely nothing at the end of the trail. lol
The only thing you can see is the blue sky and a weird opened space.

We went back the way we came and headed to the second hot spring.


(It was Mucho’s first time riding off-road, but I think he did a good job. Maybe because of the Scapegoat?）

10 more minutes of more ups and downs, we finally made ourselves to…

“Miharashi-no-yu hot spring”.
You can enter this spot with only ¥500. This one was a traditional bath house style hot spring. It is not mixed bathing and there is actually a place where you can wash yourself with soap.

The view from the hot spring was incredible, but I of course couldn’t take a picture inside, but here’s the view from the resting area.

Highly recommend going, if you ever come to Hachijojima.

Oh, the resting area was also great.

Now it was time to head back to camp. It felt like a bummer to be sweating again, after taking a bath but whatever.

We took in the beautiful scenery and kept pedaling toward our camp.

After making another stop to the local supermarket, it was time for supper.

These bananas with chocolate made by Shami was really good.


I made a potato chip omelette that I saw on Instagram. Don’t ask about the taste.

Mucho brought this strange card game called “The Mind”, so we played that throughout the night. I really like spending the night with co-workers who I really don’t have a chance to talk that much. Funny how eating dinner outside can make people closer.

It was a hard day of riding, so everybody went to bed early. (Queue the Dragon Quest sleeping theme)

Waking up in the morning surrounded by mother nature is something else. We had breakfast and packed our stuff.

Now, let’s look at our bikes!

Here’s Shami, with his Crust Bikes Evasion Lite. The bags are Fab’s Chest and the Zeitgeist from Swift Industries.
。Oh! And you can’t forget about the custom made Fairweather frame bag.

This guy knows how to Voile Strap. I was proud of him becoming a bike packing expert.

Mucho borrowed Nigo’s Scapegoat.

I feel like Voile Straps will solve everything at this point.


Another custom made Fairweather bag and a lovely Zeitgeist!
The Scapegoat is definitely a good touring bike.

This is Yum with his Surly Cross Check that he also rides to work with.

Now, I for sure think that Voile Straps are the solution to everything.The packed cockpit is nice.

The Catalyst bag is great for keeping space for your dynamo lights.
I really like what he did with the Sim Works Burrito Rack.


Asahi came with the drop bar Soma Juice.

I really like his basket packing style.

I see that he got a Surly fork for more packing capability. Very nice detail…
 And the Zeitgeist on the rear. Perfect set up, but why did ya forget your clothes?

And that’s me with my Frances.

I just added the pannier bags to my daily commute set up. More info for the Pannier bags coming someday…!


I had my clothes and other stuff I needed to take out constantly in my Ozette (Peregrine now) bag and put my mattress, tent and sleep bag in the pannier bags.

Our plan for day two was just to take the plane and leave, so we headed down to the airport. Oh yeah, this island has an airport believe it or not. And it only takes 40 minutes to go back to Haneda Airport.

You can enjoy the lovely scenery while heading to the airport.

After arriving at the airport, it’s time to get ready for the rinko.

I have done a plane rinko when I went to Kagoshima, so I had a new theme for this trip and that was rinkoing a bike with fenders. I had to take off the fenders, but I packed it in a way that they won’t get damaged. It was pretty chill, so my randonneuring possibilities went up.

Everybody was well prepared for the trip, so we were able to fly out the bikes without a fuss. Now we just have to wait for the flight…

The plane somehow was on a 2 hour delay, so we played The Mind and killed time. It was a great trip filled with laughter until the end.

Thanks for reading this long report! I hope you guys has fun too!