Wakkanai – Teshio (稚内 - 天塩) – 88km

At Cape Noshappu (野寒布岬 / not to be confused with Cape Nosappu, which I had visited a couple of weeks previously), I bought presents for Mrs M and the in-laws, in the shape of tarako (鱈子 / cod roe) and ikura (salmon roe), which would wing their way to Ibaraki via that most Japanese of conveniences, kuuru-bin (クール便 / refrigerated postage). In the UK, for a parcel of any kind to reach its destination - let alone in one piece - is a minor miracle, whereas here you can quite literally send a single choc ice from one end of the country to the other, with a guarantee that it will still be shrink-wrapped and frozen when it gets there.

From Noshappu I continued south for what was, along with the road between Akkeshi and Nemuro in the far east of Hokkaido, one of the most glorious days' riding of the summer.

The coast road makes its way through the Sarobetsu Wetlands National Park, although an equally important reason for my enjoyment was the strong following wind, which propelled me effortlessly along as a succession of grimacing cyclists passed by on the opposite side of the road, each battling against the headwind and no doubt feeling as exhausted and thoroughly pissed off as I had on the previous day's slog to Cape Sohya.

One such unfortunate was Mr Small River, who I met at a roadside café. Mr Small River worked for a saké company in Osaka, and despite looking a good ten years younger than me, revealed that this was his thirtieth time in Hokkaido. He had previously come here by both car and motorbike, and I sensed that he wasn't yet a cycling veteran, as despite his struggle with the wind being made easier by a super-lightweight racing bike (pictured), it was simultaneously made more difficult by the enormous rucksack (not pictured) he was shouldering as he rode it.

This lovingly souped-up Anpanman van was parked outside a convenience store in Teshio town...

...and just as photogenic from the front as from the back (note the mini-Anpanman figurines either side of the bumper).

The island of Rishiri (利尻島 / literally 'Profitable Buttocks Island' - yes, your guess is as good as mine) lies about fifteen  kilometres off the coast, and if my memory serves me correctly is the setting for the rather downbeat ending to Will Ferguson's excellent travel book Hokkaido Highway Blues.

Rishirisan (利尻山), the 1721-metre-high peak that dominates the island, is - like pretty much any mountain in Japan with a volcano-like profile - known colloquially as Rishiri-fuji for its supposed resemblance to Mount Fuji, and as the sun set, several amateur photographers - including yours truly - could be seen rushing around a patch of waste ground near Teshio harbour, each of us looking for the ideal angle from which to capture the scene.

Niikappu Town to Erimo Town (新冠町 – えりも町) – 117km

The Airstream parked outside Mitsu-ishi roadside services was hard to ignore, not least because it was being towed by a Hummer.

‘It’s so big we couldn’t get through the gate to the campsite,’ explained the owners, who had driven all the way from Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, ‘so we had to stay in the car park instead.’
The couple were taking a two-month trip around Hokkaido for the second summer in a row, and as well as a couple of generators strapped to the front of the Hummer, they had brought their dogs along for the ride.

Although less well known than nori (海苔 / paper-thin sheets of crispy, dark-green nori are used as wrapping for the rice and fish of rolled sushi), konbu (昆布) is probably the most palatable variety of seaweed for the uninitiated westerner, and is often served with soy sauce and sesame seeds as a rather moreish side dish called konbu-no-tsukudani (昆布の佃煮).

Just over a century ago, as Tokyo University professor Kikunaé Ikeda was eating dinner one evening, he wondered why it was that his mother’s homemade soup had always tasted so delicious. The next day he began a scientific analysis of the konbu it contained, and in the process discovered aji-no-moto (味の素 / the origin of flavour), better known in the West as monosodium glutamate, or flavour enhancer, or E621. A hugely successful business was built around Ikeda’s discovery, and by the name umami, it has been added to the very short list of fundamental flavours recognisable to the human palate (the other four being sour, sweet, salt and bitter).

95% of Japanese konbu comes from Hokkaido, and along this stretch of coastline in particular, the harvest was in full swing.

Having picked the long, black strands of konbu from the sea – they either use small boats or wade into the shallows at low tide – the locals were laying it out to dry on specially constructed pebble beds.

Because I was making good time, rather than cut inland I carried on along the coast to Cape Erimo (襟裳岬 / literally ‘collar-skirt cape’), which is the south-easternmost point in Hokkaido. Both my Mapple road atlas and several signs along the way had warned of high winds (on average, wind speeds at Cape Erimo exceed 10 metres per second - about 35kph - on 290 days each year) and fog, and and sure enough, when I arrived there the visibility was so poor that I might as well have been indoors.

Mr Assistant Wisteria didn't bother stopping to take photos, he just held up his camera phone and clicked the shutter in mid-stride, and had the air of someone who was there to tick Cape Erimo off his list. Skinny with quiffed hair and sunglasses, he looked like a typical travelling salesman - what my mother used to refer to as a 'spiv' - although having asked him to take my photo next to the sign for the Cape, he turned out to be polite, well-spoken and not a dodgy geezer in the slightest.

'I used to work for a printer company,' he said, 'but I packed it in to start my own business. I buy used cars and customise them for disabled people and OAPs, so I'm down here looking for bargains. There's nothing much around, though - the price of steel is so high that people are scrapping their cars instead of selling them secondhand.'

Mr Assistant Wisteria gave me his business card and offered to give the Transeo 4.0 GT 7005 City Cross Design a service if I made it to Sapporo, which was nice to know, as making friends in a big city can be a lot more difficult than it is, for example, on a foggy clifftop in the middle of nowhere.

It was almost dark by the time I reached Hyaku-nin-hama (百人浜 / hundred-man beach), so called because back in the days when there was no coast road, and quite possibly not a single living soul within a hundred-mile radius, a ship ran aground here and every single member of its hundred-man crew either drowned or died from starvation. Nowadays Hyaku-nin-hama has electricity, running water and even a sento (銭湯 / public baths), and just as I was leaving the latter, the woman behind the reception desk called over to me.

'Older brother!' she said. 'Older brother! Mr Village Middle wants to have a word with you.' (Not that I had quite worked it out at the time, but instead of saying, 'Hey you!' or 'Oi, mate!' the Japanese will often refer to strangers as if they are family members, so women become 'Older sister!' older men 'Dad!' and older women 'Mum!')
'Can you speak Japanese?' said Mr Village Middle.
'Yes, I can.'
‘What are you doing now?’
'I'm going to the campsite.'
‘You mean you're putting up your tent in dark?’
'Well, yes. I suppose so.'
'Not any more, you're not,' said Mr Village Middle. 'You’re staying at my place.’
'He uses some appalling language,' said the woman from the sento. 'But don't worry, he's a nice bloke really.'

'I can only fit two in the front so you'll have to sit with your bike,' said Mr Village Middle, as a friend of his helped lift it onto the flatbed of their truck.
'Er, OK. You will drive lately, won't you?'
'You mean slowly?'
'Yes, I mean slowly.'
'Don't worry, you'll be fine!'

Mr Village Middle drove north for a few kilometres - not particularly slowly, or even lately, it has to be said - and I could hear their muffled chatter as I gripped the side of the truck and watched the red glow of the tail lights on the road behind us. By the time we arrived at Mr Village Middle's house I was ravenously hungry, although I didn't want to come straight out and beg for food, so patiently sipped on a watered-down glass of shochu as we watched a boxing match on TV.

'That's Daisuké Naitoh,' said Mr Village Middle. 'He's from Hokkaido, you know. He used to get bullied when he was at school, but now he's world champion.'
If Mr Village Middle was a boxer he would have been a heavyweight: he was tall and well-built with craggy features and a mop of jet-black hair, although I couldn't help noticing that part of the little finger on his left hand was missing.

Cutting one's little finger off is a common form of penance for members of the yakuza (more commonly referred to as boh-ryokudan / 暴力団 - literally 'violence group'), and during the course of the evening, Mr Village Middle mentioned that in his younger days he had travelled the world on a tuna fishing trawler. Because this a) involves being away from home for months at a time, and b) is extremely dangerous, it is often used in a 'get on the boat or else' kind of way, as punishment for members of the yakuza who disobey the rules, or for ordinary folk who fail to keep up with their loan repayments or pay their protection money. Not that I fancied asking him about it, but as far as I could tell Mr Village Middle's shady past was just that, as nowadays he farmed konbu with his family in the summer and worked as a truck driver during the winter.

Mr Village Middle's house was very much that of a single man: I spotted at least one cockroach on the floor, the living room was used as a kind of storage area for old furniture and work clothes, most of the pictures on the wall were old and faded, the TV had a permanent purple-y green blob in the corner of the screen, and everything was slightly sticky and tobacco-stained. When it finally arrived (as I suspected, we had been waiting for the rice cooker to finish its cycle), our evening meal wouldn't have looked out of place in a student halls of residence, and along with rice I was given instant ramen, fried meat (it was so tough that I couldn't tell exactly what kind of meat, and now didn't seem to be the time or the place to mention that I was a pescetarian), and pickled vegetables, which Mr Village Middle's friend had made himself.

It was pretty hard work trying to follow what the two of them were on about, as they used only the crudest form of Japanese possible, something that wasn't so much bad language as basic language. For example, if you happen to be talking to someone of a higher status than yourself, you might say something like:

Nanika o omeshi-agari-masen ka? ('May I humbly entreat you to partake of something to eat?')

Or if you wanted to be reasonably polite without going over the top, you could say:

Nanika o tabenai deska? ('Would you like something to eat?')

If you were with friends or family, you could be more familiar:

Nanika, taberu? ('Fancy a bite to eat?')

Mr Village Middle and his pal, however, talked more like this:

Meshi, kuu? ('You gonna scoff some grub?')

In fact, I didn't even catch on when Mr Village Middle's friend said that he was off home, which left me on my own, in an isolated house, in the middle of the night, with only a supposedly ex-gangster for company. And at least one cockroach.

On reflection, perhaps it would have been a better idea to put my tent up in the dark.

Every now and then I come down with a bout of homesickness, and my most recent episode was brought on by the research I had been doing for a lecture about the photographer James Ravilious.

Ravilious was born in Eastbourne in 1939, and both of his parents were artists: his mother Tirzah Garwood was a wood engraver, and his father Eric was famous for his watercolours of the South Downs.

Having ditched his original plan of becoming an accountant, Ravilious studied at St Martin's before working as an art teacher at Hammersmith College. He married Robin Whilstler - daughter of the renowned glass engraver Laurence Whistler - in 1970, and the couple moved to the village of Dolton in North Devon.

Ravilious got a job teaching printmaking at nearby Beaford Arts Centre, and was commissioned by its curator John Lane to create an archive of life in this comparatively unchanged corner of the English countryside. By the time of Ravilious's death in 1999, the Beaford Archive contained around 80,000 of his photographs.

I first came across Ravilious's photographs in 2009, at a modest exhibition in the foyer of the National Theatre, and was struck not just by their beauty and their humanity, but by a wave of nostalgia for my own childhood: my parents moved to North Devon at around the same time as Ravilious, and I spent the first few years of my life in a small village not far from Dolton and Beaford - this particular photograph depicts the same maternity ward on which I was born.

Obviously Ravilious's work reminds me of the Devon countryside of my youth - of the narrow lanes with grass down the middle, the flocks of sheep in the road, the high hedgerows, the rolling hills, the blackberry picking and the muck spreading - but another thing that makes it so special is that Ravilious got to know his subjects over long periods of time, something that allowed him to capture for posterity the minutiae of their everyday lives.

One particular character - the farmer Archie Parkhouse - crops up again and again, most notably in what is perhaps Ravilious's best known photograph...

...but also in many others, in which we see Parkhouse both at work...

...and at home.

Ravilious's technique was deceptively simple: he shot in black and white, and more often than not from head height. His preferred camera was a Leica M3...

...which he used in conjunction with a 35mm (ie. comparatively wide-angle) Leitz Elmar lens.

Modern lenses have a coating that makes for sharper photographs and prevents lens flare (or 'Lionel Blair', as it is still referred to in Cockney rhyming slang by film and TV cameramen), whereas older lenses - including the Elmar - are uncoated.

The irony is that Ravilious had a fondness for shooting into the sun, so while his Leica equipment produced images that are soft, low in contrast and have a wonderful painterly quality, in order to reduce flare, he had to attach a handmade lens hood to the camera. This looked a bit like the inside of a toilet roll painted black, and is described by his wife Robin in the documentary James Ravilious: A World In Photographs (which as far as I know is occasionally repeated on Sky Arts, and can be purchased on DVD via the producers Banyak Films).

Ravilious experimented with various developing techniques to achieve the look he was after, and while I don't profess to understand these particularly well, as explained in this blog, he used 'film rated at 400asa, exposed at 200asa and under-developed in order to allow the shadow tones to become a little more lifted in the image'.

These days, such tinkering would be done in Photoshop rather than in the dark room, although it is probably fair to say that Ravilious's photographs - reproduced here, I have to confess, entirely without permission - are as good an argument as you will find for the superiority of film over digital photography, or at least for film as a fundamentally different medium.

I gave my lecture on Ravilious to a small audience of English-speaking locals last Saturday evening, and at the end, one of them made a very interesting point: if Ravilious's brief was to produce an archival - and therefore documentary - record of life in Devon, why did he work in black and white, and why did he put so much effort into making his photographs look beautiful?

All I can say in answer to this question is thank goodness he did, and thank goodness Lane gave him such a free rein, while at the same time paying Ravilious enough money to hone his craft over such a long period of time.

A footnote: Ravilious did in fact take some colour photographs, although I could only find one online.

And as Ravilious is quoted as saying by one of the contributors to A World In Photographs, the Devon landscape is so lush and verdant that conversely, photographing it in black and white somehow works better.

The official James Ravilious website can be found here, and you can see many more of his photographs at the Beaford Archive website, while an original will set you back between three and four hundred pounds.

The most notable book about Ravilious is called An English Eye, and much of the information for this blog post was culled from this excellent Guardian obituary.