Day 13 -- At Sea

Today we were cruising north along the island of Hokkaido towards Sakhalin via the Sea of Okhotsk. The most scenic part was around the Shiretoko Peninsula and the Shiretoko National Park, which is the wildest and most remote national park in Japan. Unfortunately, it was cloudy and misty and we couldn’t see very much. Other than that, Al played about 3 hours of ping pong and Bo did trivia and read. The composition of passengers on this part of the cruise has changed considerably and according to our unscientific assessment it’s about 70% oriental and 30% western, still dominated by the Australians, but maybe not as much. It also seems to be a younger crowd with a lot of young (20-30 stg) Japanese. Too bad most of them don’t speak English.