Asahikawa – Nayoro (旭川 - 名寄市) 126km

Today was a strange day, and one that in retrospect I probably should have taken off and spent sightseeing in Asahikawa - I could have gone to Asahiyama Zoo, for example, which is probably the second most famous in the country behind Ueno Zoo in Tokyo.

Instead, though, I headed north through the suburbs and took a wrong turn at pretty much the first junction I came to. This led me over four mountain passes and a distance of more than a hundred kilometres to the town of Nayoro, which if I had turned right on Route 99 instead of left on Route 72, would have been just 70km away along a flat valley road.

Then, having pitched my tent at a campsite in Nayoro, instead of heading back into the town centre and going to the local sento, I rode several more kilometres up a dead-end road, in the pitch dark and through swarms of insects, to an onsen that seemed so much closer when I had first found it on my Mapple.

Finally, having trekked my way back to the campsite and swallowed several more mouthfuls of bugs along the way, I was kept awake into the small hours by a biking bore in a nearby tent, who droned on interminably about his 'adventures' to two friends who remained almost completely silent (perhaps, unlike me, they had already fallen asleep without him noticing).

The only plus points about the day were getting a phone call from Mr Great Barr, who was flying over from the UK to attend the Japanese leg of my wedding to Mrs M the following month, spotting the Cutest Bus Shelter In Hokkaido...

...and meeting this lovely couple at a rest area on Route 275.

Mr and Mrs Pond Field were from Kitami, which I had passed through earlier in the week, and in the middle of a ten-day driving holiday (I assume they were civil servants, as hardly anyone else in Japan could get away with taking that much time off in one go). They suggested that I come and stay at the same campsite as them on Lake Shumarinai, which gave me yet another regret for the day: staying at Shumarinai rather than continuing to Nayoro - as I later decided to do - would have saved me a good deal of pedalling, not to mention giving me someone to talk to over dinner, which in the event I ate on my own, and hurriedly, as I had arrived at the onsen cafeteria just a few minutes before it closed for the night.

Soh-unkyo – Asahikawa (層雲峡 - 旭川) – 89km

In the Daisetsuzan national park, most of the shop fronts have been specially designed not to clash with their natural surroundings, and include this monochromatically low-key 7-11.

At Aibetsu Town the cliffs and waterfalls of Soh-unkyo...

...gave way to a wide river valley, and I stumbled across a newly constructed, thirty-kilometre-long cycle path, which allowed me to spend a blissful afternoon away from the traffic, with just the dragonflies and the grasshoppers for company (and where, parenthetically, the photograph that graces the title page of this blog was taken).

The caretaker - a Mr High Bridge - was just about to get on his scooter when I turned up at Shunkohdai Park in Asahikawa City.
'Sorry to interrupt,' I said. 'Were you busy?'
'Not at all,' said Mr High Bridge. 'I was going to run an errand but it can wait until later.'
'I can always come back, though.'
'No, no,' he said. 'O-kyaku-sama wa kami-sama dess!'
How wonderful! I thought, as this was the first time I had encountered the phrase (お客様は神様です), which means 'The customer is God'.

That morning the assistants had said hello and thank you whenever anyone went into or came out of the 7-11 in Soh-unkyo; just down the road the staff were lined up in a hotel car park to wave off a coach load of guests; in the afternoon, two assistants stood on the pavement and bowed deeply as an elderly gentleman - presumably having purchased something very expensive - left a department store in the centre of Asahikawa, and now I too felt suitably God-like as Mr High Bridge took my details and escorted me through the park to the camp ground, telling me along the way about his recent holiday in Sydney, and giving me a map that among other things showed the location of the nearest launderette.

Thanks to the map I was soon at the Futaba sento (銭湯 / bath house), where the owner pointed me in the direction of a sign detailing the etiquette of using public baths in Japan.

Something of a rarity these days, such old-style sento are cheap to enter and frequented not by tourists but ordinary local people. At the entrance to a typical one will be a raised reception desk, from which the receptionist herself has a grandstand view of both the women's and men's changing rooms. Once you have set aside your inhibitions, undressed and entered the bathing area, you will almost invariably see a mural of Mount Fuji above the baths themselves, which will be hot enough to give you first-degree burns should you spend any more than thirty seconds at a time in them. You will also, it is safe to say, be the youngest customer by at least three or four decades.

For dinner I found an equally old-style izakaya, which the owner - Mrs Holy Tree - told me she had been running for forty years.
'It used to be just fields around here,' she said. 'Then as the city got bigger there was lots of development. Eight or nine years ago the factories started disappearing again - instead of staying in Asahikawa everyone's been leaving for Sapporo or Honshu. My daughter's in Tokyo now and I haven't even been to visit her yet. I did go there once before she was born, but that was the only time I've ever left Hokkaido.'
'Why just the once?' I asked.
'The izakaya's open every day of the week except Sunday,' said Mrs Holy Tree, 'so I haven't got the time.'

As we were talking, Mr Holy Tree arrived back for a break from his job as a taxi driver.
'I used to drive a tour bus but it was tough being so far from home,' he said, 'and in any case there's more money in the taxi business. The only trouble is the hours. Once I've had dinner I'll go back out and work until early tomorrow morning - probably about 4am.'

Mr Holy Tree was a ham radio enthusiast and said that if only his English was better he would be able to talk to people in the UK and the US. As well as recommending where to visit and what to eat elsewhere in Hokkaido, he told me that the view from the Bihoro Pass - where I had been a couple of days ago - was 'the second best lake view in the world', although when I asked what the best one was he confessed that he couldn't remember.

A couple of years ago, Nihon Terebi (Japan TV) began broadcasting an offshoot of the long-running NHK programme Nodo-jiman. The original Nodo-jiman is a Gong Show-style singing contest in which ordinary folk from around the country are given the chance to perform with a live orchestra - posh karaoké, if you will - and for Nodo-jiman Za! Wahrudo (literally 'Throat Boast The! World', although the programme also goes by the more sensible, English-language name of 'Song For Japan'), the difference is that while the songs are Japanese, the singers themselves are foreign.

Mrs M has a bit of a crush on two-time winner Nicholas Edwards - a twenty-one-year-old American with big blue eyes and even bigger hair - and the winner of the sixth show was a Londoner called Paul Ballard, but if you're looking for genuine singing ability, the real star of Nodo-jiman Za! Wahrudo has been Chris Hart.

Hart was born in San Francisco into a musical family - his father is a jazz bassist and his mother a classical pianist and singer - and learned to play the oboe, clarinet, saxophone and flute while he was still a child. He began studying Japanese at the age of twelve, and the following year stayed for two weeks as an exchange student with a family in Tsukuba, Ibaraki. After graduating from university - where his studies combined his two great loves, music and Japanese - Hart applied for jobs that would allow him to polish his language skills, working at an airport and for a cosmetics company. Having moved to Japan in 2009, he got a job at a vending machine company and practiced singing in his spare time, uploading videos of himself to YouTube.

Nodo-jiman Za! Wahrudo came along at exactly the right time for Hart, who won the star prize at his first attempt in March 2012, singing Kazumasa Oda's ballad Tashika-na-koto (video here) and the SMAP song Yozora-no-mukoh. The funniest thing about his performance of the latter (video here) is that Masahiro Nakai - who is SMAP's version of Andrew Ridgely and famously can't sing - is one of the co-hosts on Nodo-jiman, and had to look on as Hart showed him how it was done.

Hart was contacted the next day by Jeff Miyahara, one of the most renowned producers in Japanese pop music, and his debut album, Heart Song, was released in June this year. Of course the true test of Hart's longevity will come when he turns his vocal chords to some original compositions, but for the moment, Heart Song shows what he has made of some of the most memorable J-Pop hits of recent years - this is a snippet from his version of the Yusaku Kiyama song Home.

This is a video of Hart singing the same song on Nodo-jiman (on the strength of this performance, the original went to the top of the download charts the following day ), and the following video shows Hart's version of the Naotaroh Moriyama song Sakura. While for some reason (possibly copyright-related) the first minute or so is audio only, it's worth watching all the way through just to see how it reduces the comedian Kanako Yanagihara to an emotional wreck.

Hart's less-is-more singing style is mirrored in his personality - it wasn't until Mrs M and I saw a news piece about him that we realised he is a fluent Japanese speaker, as he hardly says a word during his appearances on Nodo-jiman - although don't get your hopes up, ladies, as he was married earlier this year to fellow singer Hitomi Fukunaga.

At the time of writing, it is still possible to book Hart as a wedding singer via his official homepage. OK, so this is actually part of a semi-charitable scheme which has seen Hart perform for free in disaster-affected areas in the north east of the country - all you have to do is write to him and state a decent case for why you would like him to sing for you - but this opportunity will surely not be available for much longer. Most of the dates for his forthcoming national tour are already sold out, and Hart is, I suspect, destined for much bigger things.

On-neyu – Soh-unkyo (温根湯 - 層雲峡) – 72km

'I've been to the Nissan factory in Sunderland a couple of times on business,' said one of the other campers as we were packing our things and getting ready to leave On-neyu. 'As far as I could make out, everyone in England is called John. It was John this, John that, John the other.'

'A friend of mine in Tokyo's called John,' said another. 'He was married to a Japanese lady who died a few years ago, but he says that he's never going back to England because the weather's so awful. Your name's not John as well, is it?'

I reached the 1050-metre Sekihoku Pass by about lunchtime and rewarded myself with some Kumazasa, a well-known brand of ice cream in Hokkaido (of the various flavours on offer I chose lavender, although the other customers seemed to prefer the watermelon).

At around the same time as me a father and his ten-year-old son arrived at the pass from the opposite direction.

'I always promised him we'd go on a trip for a few days when his legs were long enough,' said the father, and despite insisting that he had assigned only the lightest items of luggage to his son, the son's bicycle, a mini-mountain bike with a shopping basket on the front, appeared to be weighed down with even more bits and bobs than mine.

Partly to mix things up a bit and partly after being warned about high winds along the north-east coast, I had decided to head inland for a few days, which after calling in at Lake Kussharo brought me today to Soh-unkyo, a twenty-four-kilometre-long gorge in the Daisetsuzan National Park.

There is a cable car that takes paying passengers from the valley floor to a point 1300 metres up the side of Mount Kurodaké, and apparently, some people catch the last one of the day, camp on the mountain and hike to the summit early the next morning to watch the sunrise. The sunset, though, had been all but swallowed up by the clouds when my cable car reached its destination.

At the onsen in Soh-unkyo, a young man with an impressively intricate array of tattoos over his chest, arms and shoulders was drying himself off in front of the changing room mirror - a rare sight, as tattoos are linked in the public consciousness with the yakuza, and if you happen to have one the majority of public baths will be out of bounds. I would have liked to ask him where he had them done, or even to take a photo - they were expertly drawn and hadn't turned that faded blue-green colour you so often see - but frankly he looked a bit scary, and in the end I chickened out.