Today I rode from Murakami to Tsuruoka. I rode 89 km in total. It was long. I rode the whole time from half past nine until half past six in the evening. Of course I stopped when I found interesting places, but I was riding for pretty much the entire day. It rained at the end, but the weather was mostly good.

The moment I entered Yamagata Prefecture, I thought, what a fitting name. There really are mountains everywhere. You can see them clearly even from the coast, and there's snow on the peaks too. Proper mountains.

I haven't had much chance to write. It's 10 at night now, but I'm in a ramen shop, so I can write a little.

I met four guys at an onsen. Two of them were 23, both seriously good-looking, and apparently one of them does some modelling. They asked me about the tour, and both were pretty amazed. The other two are working adults, and apparently the overtime and so on is really tough. The people I meet are generally surprised for the same reasons.

Reasons I always surprise everyone:

I can speak Japanese even though I've only just arrived I can speak Japanese even though I'm a foreigner (especially a white one) They've simply never seen a foreigner before The bike tour and the pretty long distance: Japanese people do cycle the length of the country or all the way around it, but foreigners rarely do

I got questioned by the police! First, two officers came up to my tent and shone a light on it. I thought, uh-oh, and got out. I had to show my ID and visa, but other than that it was fine. Apparently homeless people who inject drugs sometimes gather in places like this, so they just wanted to check. Once things had calmed down, we talked about anime and cooking. Two more officers turned up at that point, and one of them was the huge sumo-wrestler-looking guy I'd seen at the onsen an hour earlier.

I also met a man called Hirobobu-san. He told me he's ridden a motorbike all the way around Hokkaido. He said he's walked all the way around Japan too!