“I’m not sure I’ll be able to join you tomorrow,” Rick mused at the end of today’s efforts. We were soaking in the Tomuraushi onsen after the toughest, most uncertainty-fraught day of the trip so far. “Today’s route really took it out of me,” he said.

It certainly had been tough. What I’d hoped would be “well packed smooth gravel” (as per the Touring Mapple’s description) on the Penke-nikorobetsu Forestry Road turned out to be 45km of stop-start cycling. In multiple places we had to get off the bikes and haul them over fallen trees, or push them along narrow deer-tracks around washed out section of road. We were now in deep Hokkaido wild territory. Everything we’d experienced on the last three days was being magnified on a larger scale.

The day started out mellow enough though. We woke to a thick mist that had engulfed the campground. We were hoping it would lift enough to give us some decent views of the Daisetsu Range that we would be cycling through today. We were on pavement for about 15km, after leaving the campground riding past quintessential Hokkaido farming land.