The hook
A cat-filled hillside temple town where you rent a bike and pedal out across the Seto Inland Sea itself, island to island over a chain of soaring bridges, one of the only places on Earth you can cycle across a sea.
01Why it's worth it
Onomichi is the kind of place travellers who've done Kyoto twice go looking for: a steep, atmospheric old port town on the Seto Inland Sea, its lanes climbing the hillside past a walk of some two dozen temples, cinema history (it was a favourite of Japanese filmmakers), a famous ramen, and enough resident cats to have earned a "Cat Alley." But its real draw is what starts here: the Shimanami Kaidō, a roughly seventy-kilometre cycling route that hops six islands of the Inland Sea on a series of graceful suspension and cable-stayed bridges, linking the main island of Honshu to Shikoku. It is a genuine bucket-list ride for cyclists worldwide, and unusually easy to do: the path is gentle and well-signed, bikes rent cheaply and can be dropped at the far end, and you pedal past fishing villages, citrus groves, beaches, and shrines with the calm, island-dotted sea all around. You can ride the whole thing in a day or amble it over two, staying on an island midway. Temple town plus a cycle across the sea, it is Japan at its most quietly magical and least crowded.
02How to experience it
Wander Onomichi's temple-walk, Cat Alley, and viewpoints, slurp the local ramen, then rent a bicycle and ride the Shimanami Kaidō, one-way with a drop-off at Imabari on Shikoku, over a day or a gentler two with an island overnight. Spring and autumn spare you the summer heat. Casual riders manage it fine; e-bikes ease the bridge climbs.
From the locals
Japan residents and repeat travellers single the route out unprompted when asked what they love most: one rider, back from doing it, called the Shimanami Kaidō's "changing sceneries of sea side and mountains" simply "spectacular," and it recurs again and again in trip reports as the highlight people didn't see coming.