Today started with a bit of rain so on with the waterproofs it soon stopped and it was on with the sun cream.

We cycled on up and down some nice hills. The next thing that caught our eye was a sign to some space apples, we were not sure what these were and will never be as we didn’t find them but we did got ushered into the Nikka Whisky Distillery in Yoichi. The museum was very good and there were some interesting videos in English.

As we arrived they let us park the bikes inside and stuck a sticker on us which meant we were not allowed to have any of the three tasters, in the end we took this off and had a little try.

After looking around the museum we went to the gift shop, were we brought a snack of crabs, they were dried and had some sort of seasoning on them. They were alright.

The story behind the whisky distillery set up goes back to scotland. Masataka who set up the distillery was the first Japanese to study the techniques of whisky making in scotland and bring them back to Japan. The distillery was founded in 1934.

The angles share is the whisky that is lost to evaporation during the maturation process.

Cycling on we headed to the city of Otaru the city of canals, we had a quick look it was no venice, but only have a quick look and never being to venice that a pretty unfair assessment. We took some time finding a supermarket that was over the train tracks and in a massive shopping centre before we headed on the outskirts of Sapporo. We spent quite a long time looking for somewhere to camp. We saw signs to a greenspace, this turned out to be a pitch and put, and an unfinished park. We headed to the ‘dream beach’ www.d-beach.jp this was more of a nightmare, the sand was a gray dusty colour and there were a lot of sheds trying to sell thing most looked closed at the moment.

We headed on to another forest park this was perfect apart from the annoncement that we thought said it was closing so we left and headed on to a river bank that is quite nice and good for camping.