“Hi. I’m Rob and I’m a gravel hunter”. As introductions go, that one takes some beating. If anyone else said that to me I would probably have to bite my lip to avoid laughing, but when Rob says it, he’s not just trying to big himself up and it sounds genuine. Rob is the living embodiment of a gravel aficionado who seems to spend every waking minute searching for ever better gravel to ride around his adopted home city of Kyoto. He and I had already spent some time together earlier in my trip up in the mountains around Minakami, but we didn’t get to ride together there. Rob knew that I was keen to discover more about the gravel riding scene in different parts of Japan, so he invited me to join him on a long gravel loop ride which started in the very center of Kyoto. Rob owns and runs Backcountry Japan, a cycling tour company and his bread-and-butter work is guiding cyclo-tourists around the sights of Kyoto. He is a qualified 5* city guide which means he knows every centimeter of Kyoto inside out. But his real love is gravel riding, so his plan is to grow his business to offer full day gravel riding tours around the city, as well as his existing range of shorter leisure tours in the city itself. He was going to give me a sneak peak of his planned gravel itinerary in return for some feedback and any suggestions for how he could make it better (TL;DR – He couldn’t – his gravel tour is AMAZING!)