The Sea That Freezes

Abashiri is famous for two things: a former maximum-security prison, and the fact that its sea freezes.

Every February the Sea of Okhotsk delivers drift ice down from the Amur river mouth, and icebreaker tourism happens. In October it is a perfectly ordinary grey sea with gulls on it, giving nothing away.

The prison museum is genuinely excellent and much sadder than the brochure suggests. Men were sent here in the 1890s to build the road we drove in on. A lot of them did not leave.

Then east along the coast, past the lagoons, with the Shiretoko peninsula slowly resolving out of the haze ahead like a rumour.