This week (last week) we travelled to the very northernmost tip of Japan, where the kelp farms are busy, the seals are fat and the road signs are in Russian as well as Japanese. The jewel in the local crown is Wakkanai, a small fishing port that serves as a stop-off for Siberian sailors and, in summer, a launchpad for visits to the nearby volcanic islands that are said to be resplendent in wildflower meadows; a veritable hiker’s paradise. In winter however, Wakkanai is described by the guidebooks as bleak, baron and desolate; somewhere akin to a Siberian outpost. High praise indeed, and more than enough to persuade us that the 7-hour road trip to get there was well worth the effort. Who needs wildflowers when you have snowdrifts, blizzards and mile after mile of perennially sub-zero nothingness…
When we got to Wakkanai we headed for the port and found a chain of rusty old boats that looked barely capable of staying afloat, let alone plundering deep in the Siberian straights. We met some very nice Japanese folks (they’re almost always nice), a gnarly-looking unfriendly Russian boat captain and a gnarly-looking friendly Russian boat captain. The latter let us on his charge to take photos, which was nice, although there was a nervous moment when he told Fred and I that he just needed two more crew before he could set sail (Fred is visiting so we took him in and went for a drive). Then he looked again at our mitten-clad hands and saw that beneath the quadruple layers were were the soft, flimsy and brut-less wire frames of two middle class white boys as opposed to the hardy fishermen he really needed. Shanghai averted. That same day we stopped to snap some folks fishing through ice holes on a frozen river and tried to see the fat seals (we saw a couple of fat seal heads, but not much else; apparently they don’t like the wind and that day was bastard windy).
The high winds that caused numerous locals to offer us grave-faced warnings against the very idea of driving any further East had cleared the next day, so we headed East. We passed a big frozen lake where the swans stop to rest before their onward migration (to Canada or Dalston or somewhere) and down the coast to the ice flows surrounding Abashiri. In Abashiri it’s damn cold. They have a frozen sea and a frozen everything else. They also have blue, green and red beer, which was shite. Next day we headed cross-country over the mountains and towards home. The trip was ace and I’m very glad Gemma was feeling up to it. The End.
What goes up 