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The original was posted on /r/japantravel by /u/Kind-Alternative3677 on 2025-05-23 10:20:24+00:00.
We wanted to cycle the whole route (Onomichi to Imabari) and go to Rabbit Island. I haven’t seen many Reddit posts with people doing this so thought I’d share our experience.
We were staying in Hiroshima, so we took the 6:20 Shinkansen which got into Shin-Onomichi at 6:51. The station is small so we got out quickly and hopped straight in a taxi that was waiting outside the station. We arrived at the bike terminal by about 7AM and there were already a few people ahead of us. We didn’t book bikes because the weather was looking a bit hit and miss and we knew we didn’t want to cycle in the rain. My advice would be to absolutely book bikes if you want any kind of electric bike. They were all out of the e-assist bikes but luckily had a few e-bikes left so we were able to get those. They have tonnes of cross bikes so if you’re not fussed getting an electric one you should be fine to just turn up. A note here - we are both experienced cyclists. My partner is a club cyclist and I am a commuter cyclist. Before the ride we both thought the ~70km would be pretty easy for us to do on regular cross bikes, but ended up deciding to get e-bikes because we wanted to do rabbit island too. On reflection, it would have been too ambitious for us to do the whole ride on push bikes, and have enough time to do rabbit island. As mentioned before, there are some pretty steep inclines to get on to the bridges which I hadn’t anticipated would be quite so long.
It took us about 6 hours to get from Onomichi to Imabari. We weren’t cycling flat out, and we had our e-bikes on the lowest setting for most of the ride to preserve battery (with the exception being to go up those aforementioned inclines!). We had lots of stops along the way, there are tonnes of toilets and vending machines which we frequently stopped at. We also stopped for 45 minutes or so for lunch.
We arrived at Imabari at around 2pm, had a quick bite to eat and then got in a taxi to go to Sakari Port on Ōmishima Island. We couldn’t find another way to get there so concluded a taxi was our only way. You might be able to stop along the way and catch the ferry over to the island, but we weren’t sure if we could take bikes with us on the ferry and were worried if we did this we would miss the last time to drop off our bikes at Imabari. The taxi was expensive… but I wanted to see the bunnies so I was ready to pay lol. The taxi was approx ¥12,000 which included the tolls. Once we got to the port at Sakari we had to wait a while for the ferry. I believe they run every hour or so. We missed one by about 20 minutes so we had a 50 minute wait.
We were able to buy a ticket to rabbit island, and then another ticket to take the ferry onward to the mainland (to Tadanoumi) from rabbit island. The ferry was ¥360 per trip.
After about an hour on Rabbit Island we caught the ferry to Tadanoumi port. From here we took a JR train to Takehara and then caught an expressway bus on to Hiroshima for ¥1400. We caught the final bus of the day to Hiroshima at 18:16 so just be aware of this as a hard cut off. The bus was a surprise highlight for us! It was peaceful (in the UK we’d call it a “coach” rather than a bus) and winds its way through the hills back to Hiroshima.
It was a very long day - we left our hotel in Hiroshima at 5:45 and didn’t get back until 19:45 and we spent quite a bit of money with all the different types of public transport, plus e-bikes, but it was totally worth it. Just putting this post out there in case anyone is also planning a trip like I was and wanting to work out if they can do the whole ride and see the bunnies :)
Edit: typo