There were no more dramas during the night, so apart from my false-alarm bear sighting, we all slept well.
I was jarred awake at 1:30am again when my alarm went off. Once again, Timbah was already up and cooking breakfast when I rolled out of the tent at 1:40am. The cove was quiet and still. The only light was Timbah’s dull headlamp illuminating his big pot of bubbling oats.
Haidee emerged from the tent a few minutes later, and joined me for our oats and coffee. We could hear the slight murmuring of the swallows in their nests in the cliffs.
At around 2:30am, the rest of the crew roused themselves, and the camp was soon a quiet scene of activity.
Like yesterday, it was 3:30am on the dot when we all pushed off from the shore of the cove. The sky was already a glow of orange light.
Like the latter half of yesterday, the sea was mercurial and calm. Not a breath of wind. Spirits were high, and everyone was feeling in their element. With sea conditions like this, it was going to be a day of exploring every nook and cranny of the coastline.
The first attraction of the day was Kaizoku-wan Cove (Pirate Cove). It’s a narrow, passageway-like cove with a gushing stream at the end. Much of the surface water in the cove is fresh. In the half-light of the morning, it felt spiritual.
Everyone in the team were still caught in their own thoughts, paddling quietly as a group. Perhaps for the first time on the trip, the sea conditions allowed for inner dialogue and reflection, rather than an outer alertness.
The scenery was starting to feel much more dramatic too. Cliffs were starting to rise majestically out of the sea. Here and there, fishing huts sat nestled on the shoreline.
Here and there were old abandoned huts too. Relics of a more prosperous, perhaps more small-scale, fishing past, now rotting, unattended.
“Those monstrosities, left like garbage in a World Heritage Site, make me feel a little less complicit when I get chastised for minor mistakes in my garbage sorting,” quipped Chris. Indeed, the fastidiousness of household waste sorting felt at odds with how irresponsible it seemed to leave private dwellings to scar the landscape here.
The only consolation I could give was that these huts were here long before Shiretoko was made a national park, let alone a World Heritage site. They also represent the somewhat contentious nature of land ownership in national parks in Japan. In New Zealand, the government’s Department of Conservation (DOC) owns all national park land. DOC can therefore dictate with absolute authority how that land will be managed. In Japan, national parks are only administered by the Ministry of the Environment as a land categorization. Actual ownership of the land might be in the hands of the Ministry of Forestry, local municipalities, or private owners or leasing bodies.
This year, I became an advising member of the Daisetsuzan National Park Liason Committee. The first committee meeting of the year was a dizzying cacophony of voices and stakeholders. Shiretoko National Park is in a better situation, with fewer stakeholders involved, and the well-funded Shiretoko Foundation which has much more power in developing park policy.
Nonetheless, the decaying relics still felt somewhat at odds with the otherwise pristine nature.
On the wildlife front today, Haidee was excited to see some little Harlequin ducks and other birds.
The coastline just continued to grow in its impressiveness, and the feeling of remoteness was real.
At just before 6am, we stopped for break. We only had about 13km to paddle today to our next campsite at Tako-iwa, so we were keen to take it easy. Chris had paddled ahead, but we figured he would be fine.
In classic Timbah and Ben fashion, they ate an entire meal while we lounged on the beach. Hollow legs doesn’t really do justice to the enormity of their appetites. Haidee and I boiled up some water and had a huge pot of hot chocolate with half a bag of marshmallows.
As we made our way along the coast, the scenery really started to dwarf us. While previously I felt like I was ‘one with nature’, I was now feeling like we were being swallowed by it. Our significance as objects in the landscape was diminishing by the minute.
About half way through the day’s paddle, we passed Shiretoko River. I was expecting something more dramatic, but it was nothing more than a small creek. Ben noticed something different, however.
“Whoa, look at that waterfall,” he called out. “Wanna go see if there’s a pond at the bottom of it?” he queried.
Timbah was game. “Sure, I’m interested in some sawa-nobori!”
So we left Ben and Timbah to hike up the stream to the waterfall. They would later report it was a highlight of the trip.
We carried on without them, and just as we rounded a small cape before Kaparuwatara, we saw a tent hitched high up on the coast. There were no kayaks on the shoreline, so I wondered how they had got there.
Later, Ben and Timbah would report that they chatted to the two young university students. “They said they had walked and swum this far, and were hoping to complete the full circumnavigation of the peninsula on foot in seven days, sticking to the coast as much as possible,” reported Ben.
This seemed unfathomable. The first 15km or so of the peninsula on the Utoro side is an impenetrable wall of granite dropping straight into the sea.
“They did have a big 30m length of rope though,” said Ben, a rope-access technician by trade. “They said they were trying to use it as little as possible.”
We carried on along the coast.
Just before Kaparuwatara, we encountered the only other sea kayakers we’d seen on the trip so far. They were a couple of friends paddling together, a Japanese pair from Obihiro. They explained they paddle around the peninsula almost every year, mainly with the aim to fish as they go. “It would be nice if we can catch some pink salmon, but it’s a bit early in the season yet,” they explained.
“We also do winter trips along the coast here,” they said.
They would snowshoe along the coastline, clambering over the drift ice, and ice-climb the waterfall on Shiretoko River. One year, they accessed the waterfall by ski touring along the Rausu side of the peninsula, up and over the mountains, and descended the waterfall with skis on their backs.
At Kaparuwatara, Mick and I got distracted by the old ruins of Kashuni-no-banya hut. “Back in the day I’d do a lot of haikyo (derelict building) exploring down in Honshu,” explained Mick as we clambered over decades of discarded set net lines and buoys.
We were still playing catchup with Chris, but the coast still had gems for us to find.
We caught up with Chris just before the impressive Kashuni-no-taki waterfall. This impressive cascade falls straight into the water. Perfect for an impromptu shower and rinsing of bodies and gear.
Just around the corner, the impressive bulk of Io-zan (literally Sulfur Mountain) rose from the coast.
Not far on from Kashuni-no-taki Waterfall was our destination for the day, Tako-iwa (literally Octopus Rock). We wasted no time in pulling ashore and finding shade behind rocks for some lunch.
It was when we were settling down for some lunch in the shade behind some rocks when we came across the first and only human waste of the trip. As fresh as a daisy, there were two deposits of not only large human poops, but about half a roll of toilet paper for each. Not ideal in any sense, and the discovery really drove home the difficulties in getting people on board with poop management in the outdoors.
But really, I was just upset that these poops had the best seats in the house at this moment – they (and their stench) were hogging all the shade!
As the day wore on, and the shady rocks lost their shadiness (even the poops were in the full sun now), the sun was relentless. This drove home just how variable the weather is on the Shiretoko Peninsula. The next day, we would be bundled up in woolly hats, and today, we were sweltering, trying to find shade wherever we could.
Soon, shelter from the sun was in short supply, so tarp-master Mick got to work. He taught Haidee and me some knots, and I appreciated learning how to tie a taut-line hitch.
By the time we had the tarp up, Ben and Timbah had returned from their reconnaissance mission up to the waterfall on Shiretoko River.
“You guys have to come do it,” gushed Ben.
“It’s so awesome climbing up through a tunnel of vegetation,” beamed Timbah.
I was ambivalent about paddling 3km return to the river and climbing up through bushes in this heat. But they were selling it hard. Haidee was ambivalent too.
“If you’re interested, then I guess I’m interested,” she said.
I liked the idea of documenting a side-mission for HokkaidoWilds.org, so I took a deep breath and said yes, let’s go.
In the end, Ben stayed back and worked on his kayak roll in the calm waters around Tako-iwa, but Timbah, Haidee and I made a beeline for the river, some 1.5km back up the coast.
With bear spray in hand, we launched ourselves headlong into the towering undergrowth.
True to Timbah’s word, it didn’t take long to gain altitude, and the stream provided a perfect, if not a little slippery, trail up towards the waterfall through the foliage.
There was no pond or tarn to speak of at the base of the waterfall, but we were able to get a well-earned, and very cooling, shower.
“The descent is harder,” explained Ben before we set off from Tako-iwa. “The rocks are quite slippery.”
Haidee was making quick work of the descent, however, as she was wearing some Montbell neoprene booties that were originally intended for sawanobori (creek climbing).
During the 2.5 hours or so it took us to climb and then descend the creek, we were yelling ‘hey bear’ about every 30 seconds. We’d seen enough bears along the coast that we didn’t want to chance a close encounter.
Ben was waiting for us when we emerged from the bushes, and accompanied us back to the campsite, again via Kashuni-no-taki. The late afternoon sun was now casting rainbows in the spray.
Back at Tako-iwa, Haidee and I rushed to gobble down some dinner. It was just on dusk when we finally finished eating.
Tako-iwa was certainly the least flat campspot we’d had so far on the trip. The stony shelf we were camped on wasn’t sloping, per se, but the surface itself consisted of fist-size and larger stones. It took some careful arranging of stones to eliminate any lumpy spots under our tent.
Overall on the trip so far, camping surfaces were, predictably, not suited to driving in stakes. Tents and tarps were secured to the ground using large rocks.
The crew again agreed on a dawn start. The same 3:30am push-off from the beach that we’d been doing for the last two mornings.
Top of mind for me now was the weather forecast, calling for a 15km/h constant windspeed, directly from the west, with cloud and some rain. None of us had any experience of paddling the west side of Shiretoko Peninsula with a westerly flow, so we were keen to leave plenty of time in the day to find out what this forecast would mean once we were on the water. All we knew was that the sea condition would be much different from what we had experienced the last two days.
Despite the unfavourable weather forecast for tomorrow, the evening tonight was beautiful. Inside our tent, it was sweltering, with radiant heat rising from the hot rocks below, baked to a crisp by a full day of sun and blue skies.
Mick had also pitched a tent, but Timbah, Ben, and Chris had all opted to sleep out under the stars, making the most of a still, quiet evening.
The tranquility didn’t last long.
