On Day 5, I woke to pouring rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning - and by 7:00 a.m. it was intermittent but still pouring. After a few rounds of shall-we-go-or-shall-we stay, the camera crew and I elected to go for our Plan A, which was to skip the night in Wakkanai and go directly by ferry to the island of Rebun. By that time, there was no margin for error, and I ended up doing a 41-km sprint in the drizzly weather to Wakkanai and the ferry port. Luckily, the rain let up, and I made it in time - with a few minutes to spare, even (I spent them squeezing an amazing quantity of water out of my cycling gloves).

Incidentally: forget what I said yesterday about Sarobetsu-genya: I'm impressed. There are probably no other places in Japan with as few signs of habitation as this stretch - 30 km of virtually uninhabited wilderness. It would have been glorious if only the weather had been better...

Two hours after boarding the ferry, we were on the tiny island of Rebun that has what is almost Japan's northernmost point. I'd come to see the rural lifestyle, and came across a good example almost immediately after leaving the ferry port: a local fisherman who was distributing no-longer-needed fish heads (which he apparently uses as nourishment for shellfish) to the seabirds. Not surprisingly, he'd attracted quite a crowd, and even a couple of crows that squawked their disapproval from the safety of a nearby pole.