The Himedomachi Cycling Club

(Tonight’s lodging above)

I stayed in a dorm room last night. I had deliberately chosen it over the single private room because I thought by this stage I might be lonely and would appreciate the company. There were two bunk beds with privacy curtains. I had a bottom bunk. The room was empty when I left for dinner. When I came back the two top bunks had their curtains drawn. I had already laid out my stuff for a discrete getaway, so I crawled into my bunk, read for a while, stuffed earplugs in and went to sleep.

The guy above me turned his light on again at 2am and woke me up briefly. At 6am he got up and hurrumphed around the room, getting ready. I was writing a letter of complaint to the editor of The Daily Telegraph and I checked the Airbnb listing to bolster my argument. I was reminded that I only paid 17 francs for my bed. I also realised that, if I had taken the private room, the Swiss couple would have stayed elsewhere and I would have been left with just this oaf for company. So I ripped up my letter and counted my blessings.

I’d had a lovely evening speaking French with the Swiss couple, M and V, with one small misunderstanding. I asked them what they did for a living and they said they were, des missionnaires, missionaries. They seemed pretty cool with keeping their religious beliefs under wraps and later, when the conversation got a bit thin, I asked them which church they belonged to.

“What do you mean, what church?”

“You said you were missionaries, and I wondered which church,” I said.

“Pas ‘des missionnaires‘, ‘démissionner!‘”. They had resigned from their jobs. Oops!

I said goodbye to them the next morning and set off for Hakodate, the port town where I will take the ferry to Oma. On the way I passed through Mori, where Booth had to try three places to get a room. I liked the feel of the town, the gentle curve of its high street, the people who strolled its streets. It had a fine example of one of Booth’s bus stops and I took a picture because I can’t imagine it’s changed much in the intervening years. The chairs are likely authentic.

There were many roadworks on the highway and people people to man them. One man blows a whistle as you approach and holds up his “Slow Down” flag. The next holds a red flag telling you to stop, then waves a white flag to send you onwards, where more men do industrial things to the road, and then out the other side, past the red flag man and the Slow Down man. If the road works are rolling – maybe they are sweeping the road – then everyone has to jog along to keep up. I was often directed on to the pavement.

I love the expression, “Otsukaresama desu!” often shortened in male speech to “Otsukaresan’” or “Otsukare”. It’s often used between people who have had to work hard together to reach a goal and implies thanks without explicitly stating it. I gave them all an otsukaresan’! and the last man, in the exit slow down position, also known as silly mid on, replied in English, Be careful!

I skirted Hakodate, travelling down its western flank and then cutting east. Cyclists spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about their bum, gauging its relative soreness. I get pretty saddle sore after 80 kilometres so, after checking out the ferry port and the ticket situation, I pushed Ribena for a while and she seemed pretty happy to get this lump off her back.

I was early for my check in, so I wandered into a coffee shop called Lamp, double high ceiling, exposed wooden beams, a coffee table book on Caribou. When the shop emptied I chatted to the owner as she baked bread for tomorrow. She had studied French and visited Switzerland but, when I told her we could switch to French, she said, “That was twenty years ago.” She still knew some words and it was fun to try to switch between the two languages. She spoke to me in the easy to understand Japanese of someone used to learning a foreign language, told me she was from Tokyo, that she’d had the shop for six months. I started the Japanese expression, “Wherever you live…” and she finished it, “becomes a good place.” I think she believed it.

I’m staying in Motomachi at the foot of Mount Hakodate in a great house. The owner is from Hokkaido and had the same ebullient attitude of Mr Ohno, the Lake Toya impresario. I went down to the harbour to eat and it was packed with tourists. After long days in my own it was completely overwhelming so I wandered the side streets and stumbled into a fantastic tonkatsu restaurant that fried the cutlet and prawns Hakodate style i.e. deep brown but not dry. It was one of those places you can’t see inside, like the English pubs of my younger years and you can’t guess the atmosphere without opening the door.

I also found a bookshop with a sign for Okamura Akihito’s Dublin exhibition in the window. Okamura was a Japanese photographer who captured The Troubles in Northern Island with subtle yet powerful images, milk bottles left in the step, a British soldier carrying a woman’s front door. I desperately wanted to know why they had it in the window. The shop was closed, however, and so I will write to them instead.

I’ve deliberately stayed away from strong emotions on the trip. After 6 hours on a bike they can overwhelm you. However I feel that I should sum up my feelings after reaching the southernmost tip of Hokkaido and before I take the ferry to Honshu.

Mark Beaumont was right, mentality is everything. I trained my body, but nothing, really nothing, could have prepared me for the vast swathes of emptiness in northern Hokkaido. Hokkaido humbled me then, after Lake Toya, gave me two days off perfect cycling to build me back up. I’ve visited every emotion from utter despair and disbelief at how hard it is, to the elation and joy of thinking, “I can do this.”

I’m so happy to have done this. The graves are full of young men who died early.

My friend Jared from Canada has just his minute made his flight North from Kansai and I’m meeting him tomorrow. I’ll have company for five days. We lived in each others pockets for two years when we were ALTs on Amakusa, finishing ready others sentences, creating a private language of our own devising. It’s gonna be a blast.

I’m sorry to leave Hokkaido. I’m sorry Booth didn’t visit the more interesting bits, but watching the tourist buses pull away from the harbour, packed with people, I’m glad he visited the quieter places. I’m sorry I didn’t see more, that I raced through it, leaving so many places unvisited. I’m sad that so much of what I did was directed by the wind. Maybe I should have taken its advice and gone north. There are better ways of seeing this island than chasing ghosts.