Around

Circles Around the Sun is a contemporary instrumental rock band that formed with the specific purpose of creating intermission music for Fare Thee Well, a series of reunion concerts played by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead during their 2015 tour. Those shows celebrated the band's 50th anniversary and served as their official send-off, while Circles Around the Sun was designed to reflect the Dead's spacy and grooving overall feel. After the tour, the group issued a self-titled album from the Fare Thee Well gigs and supported it with their own road trip. The response was so positive that they remained a going concern and released Let It Wander in 2018, which was less influenced by the Dead and more freeform, delivering on the roots influence of jazz-funk, soul, and fusion. The band underwent a fundamental transition in 2019.

On this winter ride through sun and snow from northern Tokyo into neighboring Chiba Prefecture, our New Zealand cyclist Paul Imperatrice encounters a variety of artists. He meets an artisan with 55 years of experience in traditional Edo embroidery who now creates his own groundbreaking designs, another who uses local rice and seaweed to craft astonishingly complex sushi rolls and in the old castle town of Sakura, he visits a dojo where the martial arts of the samurai are taught in all their original depth.

The late autumn gingko trees are a brilliant yellow in Tokyo's neighboring prefecture of Saitama. Surprisingly unexplored, this is an area of great natural beauty with its own distinct traditions. We learn how a family of dollmakers breathes life into their creations, treasured for generations. In Kawagoe, a town with the atmosphere of centuries past, we marvel at the speed and skill of an old-style candy maker. And we discover how Saitama's special climate is the secret behind a world-class whisky.

In the city of Hiroshima we visit a community where the families who survived the devastation of the atomic bomb in the Second World War managed to revive their traditional farming specialty. In the islands to the south, we meet a potter uniquely making glazes from cast-off oyster shells, and in the mountains, a farmer tells of his passion for making animals happy. The last individual we encounter who has stuck to his own path in life is a carver of traditional instruments seeking the perfect sound.

We send 2 cyclists to explore some lesser known parts of Tokyo as they compete in our special bingo game. They have 2 days to find typical items and places in the city that correspond to squares on their cards. Pursuing this quest they discover little known facts about the city, see how a popular traditional snack is made, visit a boatyard that's been making wooden craft for 200 years and a family farm hidden among suburban houses, and play along with an ingenious drum maker.

A 250Km ride through Niigata Prefecture, its green rice fields shimmering under the summer sun. From an artisan in hammered copper we learn about the long road to mastery, while in the paddy fields we see the hottest, hardest part of the rice growing season. Climbing up into the mountains, we'll experience a traditional style of river fishing and visit a breeder whose Nishikigoi carp are now world famous, 2 stories of hard work and cooperation rebuilding lives and businesses destroyed by natural disasters.

Riding up Tanegashima's western coast with its sandy beaches, our cyclist visits a scissor craftsman, last of a 500-year old tradition. The east coast takes him past rocks carved by the ocean into fantastic shapes to Japan's biggest space center. Local schools here host children from all over the country for a year to learn about space and experience island life. Finally, he crosses to legendary Yakushima to explore its millennia-old forests and discover how nature inspires its islanders.

Our New Zealand cyclist begins his ride through Tottori Prefecture with a fat bike tour of its spectacular 16-km long sand dunes. In the mountains, he drops in to a high school calligraphy club where he is hugely impressed by the way these young girls have created a powerful performance using traditional brush calligraphy and music. Returning to the coast, he's amazed by hearing from farmers how their ancestors' hard work and inventiveness produced techniques for growing food in sand. Join us, and discover this unique part of Japan.

A 400km ride through Kyoto – the prefecture, not the city. Farms in this lush countryside supported the ancient capital's unique cuisine and tea culture, while artisans used local wood and stone to craft tools for Kyoto artists. We take tea in an 800-year-old teahouse, go deep in the forest with a whetstone craftsman to mine for stone, experience a 1,000-year-old drumming tradition, and finally, on the Sea of Japan coast, hear the story of a mother and daughter selling fish from their mobile store.