CALL OF THE WILD
I scroll through photographs of the Tasman Peninsula on my phone and my guide, Kimi, can’t believe it. “That’s not here?” she asks. We’d been rambling through the forest to reach the edge of Hokkaido’s remote Shiretoko Peninsula and the resemblance to Tasmania’s untamed south-east coastline is uncanny. But the similarities soon run dry.
Giant, jagged, grey-green sea columns rise out of cold, dark water, but instead of protruding from the Southern Ocean, here they’re sculpted by the Sea of Okhotsk. And instead of finding the odd Bennett’s wallaby or blue-tongue lizard on our trails, we might encounter red foxes, sika deer, brown bears, or – come nightfall (and if you’re lucky) – the elusive Blakiston’s fish owl, the world’s largest owl.
Shiretoko Peninsula, on the eastern side of Japan’s northernmost island – pointing squarely towards Russia – is one of the, meaning ‘a place where the Earth protrudes’ or ‘the end of the Earth’. And that’s how it feels to be here today.
