Know the Points 4: Wakkanai

The last stop before the long haul back to Sapporo:

Distance from Sapporo: 316km

Distance from last Point (Shiretoko): 438km

It may be uncharitable to say so, but when we made it to Wakkanai last year on our road trip up from Sapporo, I was thoroughly underwhelmed with the place.

Then again, that might have been because we’d just spent the day watching the scenery of Hokkaido dwindle down as we went: from mountains, down to rocky ocean cliffs, down to escarpment-like sandy bluffs, and, eventually, down to the otherworldly flat sand and grass of Sarobetsu, where they needed to install tunnels in the middle of nothing as wind shelters for drivers, where there was absolutely nothing to impeded our view of a perfect sky fire sunset behind the Mount Doom of Rishiri Island, out in the sea of Japan.

After the flat of Sarobetsu, the road gradually climbed over a ridge before dumping us into the hollow carved out by the northern port of Wakkanai.

I blame Wakkanai’s bleakness on too much exposure to Russia. The Japanese citizens of Wakkanai can actually make good on Sarah Palin’s vacuous exaggerations about seeing Russia. On a clear day, from the hills around the city, you can clearly see the Siberian peninsula (island?) of Sakhalin extending down from the north. Wakkanai definitely seems like a city suffering from a little too much soviet influence.

Or Wakkanai’s bleakness may be blamed on the fact that the city appears to have been in declining stasis since sometime back in the 70s or 80s. Everything is old in Wakkanai, but not in that proper, historically- or even nostalgically-significant old way. It’s more of a past-expiration old: a beyond-collecting-dust-and-in-to-collecting-dirt old.

Long story short, Wakkanai is the only one of the points I’ve been to before, and it’s the one of the points I’m in no hurry to get to again. Its presence as Point 4 is a bit of a geographical necessity of traveling to all the distant points of this island, and I’m really hoping that when we get there this time I’m forced to eat my condemning words about it.

I mean, I guess it’s not all bad:

And, with the fourth and final Point covered, all that's left now is to get on with the road trip starting September 18th!