Date

2022-11-08, Tuesday

Distance

52.43 km (1679.61 km in total)

For last night’s camping location, we picked a spot in a big park where the toilets were closed, but which was within 2-minute of walk from a 24/7 convenience store. Everything sounds convenient to me. However, my friend is the type of person who needs to go to the washroom immediately after she wakes up; 2-minute of walk is like eternity for her.

For this reason she’s been moody and gloomy since this morning so I alone climbed up a steep hill to a viewpoint to see the Hakucho Bridge, the largest suspension bridge in eastern Japan. From atop the hill I could behold the entire prosperous and industrialised city of Muroran sitting on a rocky promontory, spanning over an crescent-shaped islet with mountains towering in the distance. It's too bad that the Hakucho Bridge does not allow cyclists crossing, or else we could have explored Muroran at a more leisure pace.

From Muroran we have to bike along the curve of Volcano Bay to reach Hakodate where we will take the ferry to Honshu. This long stretch of nothing in between small towns is not short of surprises: for instance, the detour we made today to see Lake Toya, a volcanic caldera lake having a recursive island in the middle, was quite nice. Moreover, the scenery of this part of Hokkaido is majestic if you stand at a higher elevation to view the shoreline.