Instead, you climb the stairs to the observation deck and, through windows streaked with dust and nose-smears, you gaze out at the majesty that is Cape Sata.Ī few tourists mill about, uncertain what to do with themselves now that they've seen the view. Inside, a tired-looking woman is selling squid that is skewered on sticks and covered with thick, sticky, soy sauce. You ring the bell and rouse the gods and continue deeper into the forest green.Ī faded cinderblock building is perched at the edge of a cliff, clinging to the last solid piece of ground. Along the way, you come upon a forest shrine. A tunnel disappears into the mountainside.įrom here you proceed on foot, through the unexpected cool damp of the tunnel, past the obligatory souvenir stands, onto a path cut through the trees.

The road twists up into the mountains, turns a corner, and ends - abruptly - in a forest of cedar and pine. Tattered palm trees and overgrowths of vine crowd the roadside. His first three books were plucked from the slush pile: he is the author of the satirical bestseller Why I Hate Canadians, which was all but banned from export (though it can be ordered online at chapters.ca, he advises), and his other works include a nuts-and-bolts traveller’s bible, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Japan, as well as a humorous exposé about his experience in a misguided drunken government youth program, entitled I Was a Teenage Katima-victim! He has also written an insightful and highly scientific political analysis: Bastards & Boneheads (it was a study of our leaders).A road winds its way in descending squiggles toward the sea, like the flourish at the end of an autograph. ‘I have absolutely no sense of direction.’įerguson has a BFA in screenwriting from York University, Toronto. ‘How I ever became a travel writer is beyond me,’ he confesses.

Indeed, he prides himself on having gotten utterly and hopelessly lost in more than a dozen exotic locales, including Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea, and Japan. Fortunately, he managed to escape, and he has since travelled throughout Latin America and East Asia.

Will Ferguson was born and raised in the former fur-trapping settlement of Fort Vermilion in the backwoods of northern Canada.

Hokkaido highway blues by will ferguson