Date

2022-11-07, Monday

Distance

64.57 km (1627.18 km in total)

Muroran is a harbour city, yet along the way we biked through today, we didn’t see many fishing boats; instead, there were a lot of mining-related equipments, one of which was grinding something into sand. Consequently, trucks abound in this area, and on the narrow shoulder — if there is any — a mixture of rocks and sand makes cycling unpleasant. I finally got to understand why people kept telling me to be careful while travelling by bike in this part of the country: this stretch of the road gets narrower and narrower to the point of having no shoulder at all.

We have decided to eat simple lunch on a beach, listening to the music composed by ocean waves, because I don’t want to waste the precious daylight time in sitting in a restaurant for an hour. After all, we will have as much time as we want to spend in eating fancy after the dark. To reward ourselves, at the end of the day we had dinner at a sushi restaurant where I finally saw rotating sushi in action.

I also went to a local post office to buy a set of special stamps commemorating Muroran that were only available at certain locations. The staff, despite speaking poorly English, took my request very seriously by phoning the other post office to reserve the set for me to pick up. Maybe they are pleasantly surprised that a foreigner is interested in Japanese philately.