Hamamasu – Sapporo (浜益 - 札幌) - 90km

As I was talking to Mr High Bridge - a student from Ibaraki who had got up at five that morning and cycled all the way from Sapporo - a four-wheel-drive van with monster truck tyres pulled into the convenience store car park. Having jumped down from the driver's seat, a middle-aged man with an Elvis-like quiff came over for a chat and a cigarette and handed both of us his business card.

'If you're ever in trouble, call me here,' he said, and while it was highly unlikely that either Mr High Bridge or myself would find ourselves in trouble in or around the town of Hamamasu at any point in the future, we appreciated the gesture.

I made it to Sapporo myself at about lunchtime, and on the recommendation of Mr Eminent - the architecture student I had met the previous day - went straight to Moérénuma Park. Moérénuma Park is perhaps the most famous work by the artist Isamu Noguchi, who was born in the US to an American mother and a Japanese father, and became active in numerous different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, interior design, set design and landscape gardening.

While construction on the park began a few months before Noguchi's death in 1988, it wasn't completed until seventeen years later, and among Moérénuma's several square kilometres of geometric landscaping are fountains, cherry trees, tennis courts, an art gallery, an athletics track, a concert stage, a playground, a paddling pool, a baseball field, and a sixty-two-metre-high artificial mountain that boasts one of the best views in the city.

My next appointment was with Mr Assistant Wisteria, who had given me his phone number three weeks ago at Cape Erimo, and we met at Misono subway station to the south east of the city centre.

Over dinner at a restaurant nearby, Mr Assistant Wisteria confessed that he had given up drinking six months ago, before proceeding to down three glasses of beer in quick succession, and I wasn't quite sure whether to feel privileged that he was willing to jump off the wagon in order to toast my safe arrival in Sapporo, or fearful that I had managed to make friends with another raging alcoholic, in the same mould as Mr Small Field from Kushiro. In the event, though, Mr Assistant Wisteria knew how to hold his liquor, and to the best of my knowledge didn't use the phrase 'Sapporo, number one!' at any point during the time I was with him.

Like me, Mr Assistant Wisteria played guitar in his spare time, and at the end of the evening we had an impromptu jam session back at his apartment, where I tried my best to remember the chords to a medley of Oasis and Frank Sinatra songs, and he played the English (that is to say, British) songs that he knew - among them Yesterday and Layla - along with some Japanese enka (演歌).

Enka is the Japanese equivalent of American country music, in that it is perennially unfashionable, beloved of old folks, and its lyrics - cf Hibari Misora's Bihoro Pass from Day 15 - are more often than not about breaking up with one's lover. In fact, Mr Assistant Wisteria's life story wouldn't have looked out of place in an enka song.

'I used to be married,' he told me. 'We even had our honeymoon in Hawaii, but then a couple of years ago we got divorced.'
'Have you got a girlfriend now?'
'No, I haven't. I'm playing a concert with some mates of mine soon, and all of them are married with children. I'm forty-four now and I'm the only one left from my year at school who's still single. My sister's got two kids and my parents are putting pressure on me to get married again, but I'm not in a hurry. I've had my heart broken once so I'm a bit more choosy now - I'm waiting for my destiny.'

Minato-machi – Hamamasu (港町 - 浜益) 88km

At about 2am I got up to go for a pee, only to be confronted with a portly young woman who wore white wellington boots and brandished a mop. As I was standing at the urinal she said a cheerful hello - revealing in the process that most of her front teeth were missing - and went on to tell me how the sinks were often dirty because swimmers and campers would tramp in from the beach and wash their feet in them. Quite why she was cleaning the toilet block in the middle of the night was anyone's guess, but she was very jolly, and I complimented her on a job well done before going back to my tent.

At a michi-no-éki later that morning, I encountered two cyclists who had met on the road and decided to ride together to Wakkanai. One was Mr Abundant Fortune, a university student in Yokohama, and the other Mr Circle Field, at seventy-two years old approximately fifty years his senior. Smiling, tanned and with the aura of a Mr Motivator-style daytime TV fitness instructor, Mr Circle Field said that he used to be an engineer at power plants and had worked as far afield as Saudi Arabia.

'You never know,' he said. 'I might be laid up in bed terminally ill this time next year, so I'm getting out and about while I still can. Take my advice, though, and have kids sooner rather than later - you don't want to have to look after them when you're old.'
'I can't imagine you'd have too much trouble,' I said, and thought that this is exactly how I want to be when I'm in my seventies: still fit and still cycling (Mr Circle Field's only concession to age was the bandana he wore as a mask - 'To keep out the exhaust fumes,' he said).

Today it seemed like every few minutes another cyclist would pass by on the other side of the road, and I met Mr Eminent during another one of my snack breaks that afternoon. An architecture student, Mr Eminent wore a towel around his head - a look beloved of daiku-san (大工さん / carpenters and builders) all over Japan - and as well as touring in Thailand and Vietnam had recently been to Europe in search of old buildings.

'I ate for free last night,' he said cheerfully. 'The staff at a convenience store were throwing out some bento that had passed their sell-by-date and said I was welcome to one if I wanted it.'

Over the course of many decades and no doubt at great expense (see Day 5), the Japanese authorities have effectively succeeded in buliding a road around the entire coastline of Hokkaido, a task that neccessitated the construction of countless tunnels. Particularly given Japan's status as the most earthquake-prone country in the world - not to mention the harsh climate this far north and the relative inaccessibility of many parts of the island - such tunnels constitute an impressive feat of engineering, although as I often worried while cycling through one, they do very occasionally fail.

The most notable incidence of this happened in the Toyohama Tunnel west of Sapporo one morning in 1996, when an estimated 27,000 tons of rock collapsed onto the unfortunate occupants of a car and a bus that happened to be passing through it at the time. Twenty people lost their lives, and when it was eventually dug out, the bus had been flattened to a third of its original height.

As a cyclist, though - and much more so than being crushed pancake-flat beneath an entire mountainside - the tunnels of Hokkaido are dangerous because, with a few notable exceptions, they are narrow, poorly lit and often devoid of a pavement. Even if there does happen to be one, it will more often that not barely be wide enough to cycle along, so high that should you veer off the edge and onto the road your front wheel will buckle from the impact, and lined with SOS telephones that protrude from the tunnel wall just that little bit too far to enable you to pass them comfortably. Not only that, but the gutters you ride through instead will be awash with a filthy cocktail of ground water and engine oil.

This stretch of Route 231 was even more blessed with tunnels than most, and by now I was cautious enough to stop before entering one, turn on my lights, put on my glasses (my eyesight gets drastically worse in the dark) and check behind me for approaching vehicles. I have to say, though, that I never quite felt at ease while cycling through one, and would grip the handlebars for dear life whenever a car - or particularly a truck - roared up from behind me to overtake (it goes without saying that engine noise is amplified tenfold in such a confined space, and when a cyclist passed by in the opposite lane, the two of us would often have to shout 'KONICHIWA!' at the tops of our voices in order to be heard).

Of course - and having said all that - sod's law dictates that if I am ever unfortunate enough to kick the bucket on my bicycle, it will not be beneath the wheels of a twenty-ton truck or in the murky depths of a tunnel, but by a Nissan Micra, on a sunny day, a straight road, and while wearing the most brightly coloured and highly visible clothing in my wardrobe.

Teshio – Minato-machi (天塩 - 港町) – 91km

Part-way through the morning I saw a young man on an overloaded, single-speed shopping bike - aka mama-chari - cycling towards me on the opposite side of the road, and followed him as he pulled into Shosanbetsu michi-no-éki. His name was Mr Enduring Magnificence, and he was on a six-month circumnavigation of Japan.

'How on earth do you manage on a mama-chari?' I asked him.
'The morning after the first day of the trip,' he said, 'I literally couldn't stand up. It's your quads that hurt the most when you ride one of these, but I'm used to it now.'
'How far are you cycling each day?'
'About eighty kilometres.'
Despite the fact that my own bike weighed several kilos less and had twenty more gears, and that I wasn't, unlike Mr Enduring Magnificence, carrying a rucksack the size of a Marshall stack at a Led Zeppelin concert on my back, this was, I'm embarrassed to admit, the same distance that I was covering.
'I saved some money doing a temporary job on a farm a few weeks ago,' he continued. 'But I'm trying to keep my spending down to three or four hundred yen a day. I never stay on proper campsites, I never go to restaurants and I eat instant curry most of the time - it only costs a hundred yen!'
There was a gas stove, a saucepan and a 2kg bag of rice strapped to Mr Enduring Magnificence's mama-chari, and as we were talking he unpacked and began to prepare his lunch.

'I never go to onsen, either,' he said. 'That would be a whole day's budget gone in one go.'
'Where do you wash, then?'
'I just use the sinks at places like this - in parks and at barbecue areas. Several friends of mine around the country have promised to let me stay, so I'll be able to have a proper bath then.'
'What are you going to do when you're finished?'
'I'd like to stay in London for a while but it's too difficult to get a work visa for the UK, so I'm going back to Australia instead. I lived there for a couple of years and a guy I know in Brisbane has promised me a job.'

We were soon joined at our picnic table by Mr Great One, who had almost completed his own south-to-north trip through the country, and who in contrast to Mr Enduring Magnificence rode a bicycle with gears, wore proper cycling shorts, wasn't carrying a rucksack the size of a Marshall stack at a Led Zeppelin concert on his back, and said that he got up at 4.30 every morning, took a siesta at lunchtime, and bathed at proper onsen in the evening.

Hemmed in between the sea, the road and the mountains, and at the mercy of high winds and heavy snow over the winter months, many of the houses along this stretch of Route 232 are protected by high wooden fences, so that at times it felt as if I was cycling past the set for a cowboy film.

That night, though, I pitched my tent on a beach of soft sand at Minato-machi. Just a short distance back along the coast, white-crested waves were crashing against the rocks, but through some trick of geography (or engineering - I wondered if there wasn't some submerged tsunami protection barrier beyond the harbour walls that flanked the beach) the sea here was as ripple-free as a fish tank. Not only that, but along the west coast of Japan there is practically no change in the water level between high and low tide, so there was little danger of being swept away in the middle of the night.

The showers next to the beach were meant for daytime bathers and already locked by the time I arrived, so the family in the tent next to mine offered to give me a lift to an onsen along the coast, and even shared their dinner with me (a paper plate of curry, as it happened, which may or may not have cost them a hundred yen).

Otoh-san (お父さん / dad - I was never told his real name) was a 42-year-old truck driver; tanned, shaven-headed and a man of few words. His partner was at least ten or fifteen years his junior, and they had a one-year-old daughter with a pudding-bowl haircut who eyed me warily ('She's never met a foreigner before,' her mum explained). They had travelled from Tomakomai for a three-day holiday in what otoh-san called their 'bus': a big pink and purple camper van with faux-velvet-upholstered sofas and a fitted kitchen in the back, and a sound system with an animated computer screen in the front that played a continuous selection of bouncing dance-pop. A friend of theirs from Sapporo had joined them for the trip, and the final member of their party was Kuro, a chihuahua who they claimed was house-trained, and left to his own devices on the bus while we went into the onsen (kuro, you may not be surprised to learn from looking at this photo, means 'black').