Quick facts -
Holiday type : driving, sight-seeing, easy
Duration : 10 days
Flight path : Singapore - Narita/Tokyo - Sapporo - Narita/Tokyo - Singapore
Airlines : Delta, Air Asia Japan
So here's my latest freed and easy holiday and would like to share the things I've learnt and enjoyed. Hope all those who want to plan a similar holiday in Hokkaido, Japan will benefit from this.
Planning in short...
This is my second time in Japan and my wife and I wanted to do Hokkaido with a car. Planning took about 2 months, which is short 'cos we were so busy at work. As usual tickets were expensive the nearer to your travel date.
The usual items to plan:
Cities/Towns Schedule - Sapporo (22, 23, 24 Sept), Furano (25, 26, 27 Sept), Sapporo (28 Sept) Tokyo (29, 30 Sept, 1 Oct).
Transport - Inter-airport trains, city subways, car (Mazda Rental Sapporo)
Flights - Delta DL622, DL621 (Singapore-Tokyo), Air Asia JW8527, JW8520 (Tokyo - Sapporo)
Hotels - Sapporo (Susukino Green 1, 2), Furano (Furano Fresh Powder Apartments), Tokyo (Asia Center Hotel)
Note on air tickets:
Singapore-Tokyo tickets
For the Sin-Tokyo Delta tickets, I transferred my Delta miles over to my wife's account to make up for the shortfall she needed to redeem a ticket, with all the transfer (S$230) and admin ($70) fees, her ticket worked out to about S$300 and mine a normal ticket at S$640. So both of us were in Tokyo with S$940 or S$470 a person. At that time the other best option we had was going with Cathay Pacific at S$934 each.
Tokyo- Sapporo tickets
We looked at the idea of using the train from Tokyo to Sapporo but it proved to be more expensive and long to get there. One way on the JR train is about S$370 and it's a 10-hour trip. So we looked at the new Air Asia option and took the 2-way tickets which worked out to about S$230 a person. So it was S$700 per person Singapore-Tokyo-Sapporo-Singapore.
The trip and photos...
The Singapore-Sapporo journey
As much as we prepared ourselves mentally for the long journey from Singapore to Sapporo, we were still quite drained. We got up at 330am and met the cab at 410am for the Singapore - Tokyo leg which started at 610am, arrived in Narita Terminal 1 at 210pm. We took our bags and got to the Air Asia check in which was Narita Terminal 2 with a free shuttle bus in 10 minutes. At 415pm we were on the plane bound for Sapporo, New Chitose Airport. After a short snooze we landed at New Chitose at 610pm - 12 hours after first flight and we haven't got to our destination - the hotel bed.
We bought the JR train ticket from New Chitose to Sapporo for Y1040 yen and within 40 mins we were in the city. A 2 stop subway ride (Sapporo - Susukino) took us to our hotel at Susukino Green 1 Hotel where we finally checked in at 810pm - (15 hours door-to-door).
Tips: Good to have the Narita airport layout and which terminal you are landing in to have a smooth transit to your connection.
Sapporo, Odori, Susukino (22-24 Sept)
Sapporo is a nicely laid out city in a neat grid system. Each street block is given a North/South #, East/West # to show it's position from the city centre. Our hotel for example was at South 4 and West 2.
Susukino is the entertainment area and was naturally a great place to stay for food and shopping.
We found a nice sushi bar where we had 3 good dinners because the service was warm and friendly and prices quite reasonable by Hokkaido standards e.g. a 2-piece salmon toro sushi plate was going for Y160 (S$2.50). As usual they thanked us out the door with all the bowing and loud appreciation.
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| Odori Park, Sapporo |
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| Clam chowder at Odori Park, Autumn Festival
We sampled raw corn at S$3.20 a cob!!! and some very nice clam chowder. Note the plastic bag hanging on my rucksack. There are somehow very few dustbins in Japan and so it's good to save your plastic bags and accumulate your trash and dump it when you get to a toilet or even bring it back to your hotel room.
Moving around Sapporo is quite easy but pretty expensive on the subway, each trip cost Y200. We got a Y1000 SAPICA, a store value card for convenience but for Sundays you could get a one-day travel-all-you-want card at Y500. Great transport info here. Fishing at 10pound (http://10pound-hokkaido.com/) I am an angler so one of my plans for Hokkaido was to catch a salmon or trout. I signed up for a day trip at a trout fishing pond near Eniwa station which is 2 stops from New Chitose airport. The trip includes lunch and transport to and from the trout pond from Eniwa station. It took some waiting to get the replies from 10pound but my wife and I were finally chucking spoon and minnows at the trout. Nevertheless, after 3 hours of casting we couldn't entice any of the jumping trout to bite. Somehow the fly fisherman were having a better day. |
Still it was a beautiful place and it was great seeing my wife fish again.
Fishing tackle shopping in Sapporo
As with all anglers, tackle hunting is also top on the list of things I do when on holiday and Japan is the source of most of my fishing equipment and gadgets. So if you are like-minded, there's a great 4-storey store in Saporro for tackle. It's called Amegoyo or AFT and here are the coordinates : http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
213874386253067173587.0004ca4d1a0509df9eaee
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| One of the many alleys |
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| All kinds of weird stuff too (700g jigs?) |
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| No shortage of squid rubbers |
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| the loot after 2 hours in store. |
The store was amazing!
Renting a car and driving to Furano (25-28 Sept)
There's also a great pdf with good information about driving in Hokkaido here.
GPS drama...
I asked the rental guys to help program in my destination in Furano which was the Furano Fresh Powder Apartments. With stop start English and some hand signals we managed to get some instructions on how to use the GPS. There was one big thing left out - a sticker above the GPS stated in Japanese that you have pull the parking break to have full use of the GPS. That little info proved to vital later and we had a panic situation one night and got lost and couldn't find our way back to the apartment. Do note this safety feature in Japanese car rental GPS.
Nevertheless a nice feature for finding locations in Japan is using telephone numbers to locate an address. We used this feature very well after getting the phone numbers of all the places we wanted to find.
We started our journey with some light rain, drove by the hotel to pick up 2 pieces of luggage. The journey was to take about 2.5 hours according to Google Map, another great tool for planning our drive trip. The plan was to get out of Sapporo and take the Hokkaido Expressway, exit at Takikawa to enter Highway 38 to Furano.
The speed limit on most roads is 50km/h but I notice not many Japanese drivers especially truck drivers keep to this speed limit. I followed as much as it I could but had to go faster due to tailgating trucks. Making sudden turn decisions is quite dangerous as they followed so close to you. Had a near miss when exiting to entrance of a flower farm. Even though I had signaled much earlier not knowing exactly where the entrance was.
On the expressways, the limit is 80km/h and they are quite disciplined in keeping to the left of two lanes when not overtaking.
The traffic cops are quite nice and announce their presence quite clearly on the trunk roads, no hiding behind billboards and trees. They will park the patrol car pointing out to the road and turn on their roof top light.
Driving in Hokkaido is nice and the views are beautiful especially for city dwellers like me, the crop fields, harvested, near harvest, ploughed or littered with hay bails reminded me of some of Van Gogh's paintings.
We brought along a in-car camera with 16GB SDcard so we could record the views and also be able to recall the various things that got our attention.
Getting from Sapporo to the Hokkaido Expressway....
Here are some screenshots showing the way into the Hokkaido Expressway from Sapporo.
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| Sign in Sapporo leading us to the Hokkaido Expressway |
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| Find the green signs that lead you to the expressway |
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| Which lane to take? |
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As you approach the ticket booth, sensors pick up your presence and the booth will spit out a ticket to register your entrance into the tolled expressway. Keep it till you exit the expressway, pass to the attendant and they will calculate how much you are to pay, price will be displayed on a digital display. |
We made a single pit stop and found the toilets on the road and almost anywhere in Japan to be so clean and a delight to use. On this pit stop there were even special covered parking for the handicapped if you can see the sign on the top right corner of this image.
Out of the Expressway and onto Furano
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| Exit 8 to Takikawa and onto Highway 38 |
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| Again take the green lane on exit |
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| An attendant waits to take your ticket |
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| Paid 2250 yen (S$36) for about 80km of travel! |
The Furano Highway 38...
Immediately the speed limit drops to 50km/h and it was single lane. Although the views were interesting, it was getting quite tiring to maintain the speed limit with over 10 cars trying to pass you. I upped the speed to 60km/h so I wouldn't get stares (no they didn't). But there were some 2 lane areas for overtaking.After another hour's drive we got to our accommodation with the guidance of the GPS.
Accommodation in Furano
My first destination in Furano was our rental apartment by the name of Fresh Powder Apartments. They had 2 studio apartments on the 2nd level and a larger one on the ground floor. We took the studio which had full amenities including a fire place and a PS3. It was quite expensive but we loved it and it is value for money. A night's stay in the studio was priced at Y16,000 (S$250).
The hosts, Tim and Hiro were friendly and warm. Thanks Tim for helping with the GPS. We would really like to stay there again when we revisit Furano. We had a great stay there, cooked and enjoyed the fire place which was good to have on the rainy night we arrived. If only we had a window that overlooked the ski slope.
The flower farms around Furano
We know we were quite late into summer and from all the research we did, by this time, so late in September, we should have missed the pretty flowers in Hokkaido and get the red autumn leaves.
Much to our delight, it had been a long hot summer here and a number of flower farms still had a good crop of flowers. The long summer had on the other hand delayed the color change in the leaves. Can't have it all!
We visited five places to see the famous Hokkaido flowers - a Tomita, Farm Kanno, Flowerland Kamifurano, Zerubu Hills and a small patch of sunflowers at the grape juice factory.
Here are the coordinates of all the flower places we visited - http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
213874386253067173587.0004cbaf49335b9be72ad
Much to our delight, it had been a long hot summer here and a number of flower farms still had a good crop of flowers. The long summer had on the other hand delayed the color change in the leaves. Can't have it all!
We visited five places to see the famous Hokkaido flowers - a Tomita, Farm Kanno, Flowerland Kamifurano, Zerubu Hills and a small patch of sunflowers at the grape juice factory.
Here are the coordinates of all the flower places we visited - http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
213874386253067173587.0004cbaf49335b9be72ad
1 Sunflower patch near the grape juice factory - This was the nearest to our apartment and we were actually heading to the Grape Juice Factory. Nothing much in the factory but this sunflower field caught our eye and we drove over to take our photos. The sky and clouds were cooperating and so we got plenty of nice shots. A nearby plot of grape vines full of fruits were there too. We were careful not to disturb anything knowing that the farmers are very protective of their crops.
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| Patch of sunflowers near the Grape Juice Factory |
2 Kanno Farm
A great place to start the flower tours if you only have time for one stop, Kanno Farm is easy to find as you can see it from the road. We drove northwards from Furano on Highway 237 for about 40 mins to get here. As with most of the flower farms around Furano and Biei, the flowers are grown on a slope making them more impressive from a distance.
The house at the top of the hill made a nice focal point of the pictures so I couldn't help including it in all the shots featured here.
3 Farm Tomita - This is actually the most famous flower farm in Furano and Hokkaido actually but due to the timing of our visit so late into summer or at the beginning of autumn, the flowers were disappointing. Judging from the number of visitors we saw and the 'touristy' setup , the place still draws most of the tourist in bus loads. So getting a picture without people in it proved difficult compared to Farm Kanno which had less tourist and due to the smaller parking lot may have deterred the buses. Still it was a nice stopover nearer to Furano. It has a dried flower section, an ice cream cafe (try the lavender sundae - tastes like soap to me), green houses and a nice toilet with live grass roof (like those in Switzerland).
Just opposite of Farm Tomita is the Tomita Melonhouse featuring the Hokkaido rock melon. The melons are extremely sweet and fragrant and expensive too. Had a slice for 250yen (S$4), the most expensive slice of fruit I've ever had...but you've got to try them.
4 Zerubu Hill Flower Farm
By far, the furthest flower farm away from Furano, Zerubu Hill has some unique features. First off, it has a poignant looking tree that brings out the flowers around it very nicely. The other feature is its size which accounts for the need or availability of renting golf carts and six-wheel drive around the large compound. We arrived quite late in the afternoon and so was losing precious light. Here are some shots...
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| View of the Volcanic Vents on Asahidake from Zerubu Flower Park |
Asahidake
This is quite a special peak. About an hour and half's drive from Furano will bring you to the foot of the peak where the ropeway or cable car starts.
A ten minute ride on the cable car then takes you to the start of an easy track to the volcanic vents.
The track is circular and if you don't stop, can be covered in 30 mins but we took our time to enjoy the walk and not stress the heart too much, snapped tons of photos and enjoy the fresh air...not at the vents though as it smells of sulphur there.
A number of clear water pools scatter over the area.
Bringing lunch is a good idea as there are such wonderful spots to just enjoy a bite. Tough to keep the food warm though. It's quite windy and cold up there, but bearable.
This trip to Hokkaido was a good primer to the possibility of more trips here especially in different seasons. I am definitely considering trips in winter and summer and maybe even fall again when I can really catch the red leaves. We were almost assured of the colored leaves at this time by the research that we had done but still we were too early, this year.
After 3 days in Furano and its outskirts, we took a quick drive back through Asahikawa and back down the Hokkaido expressway. We managed to reach the rental at the designated time and rolled our bags across the street to our hotel - the Susukino Green 2 hotel. We had picked this hotel and stayed with Mazda car rental, thereby risking a non-English GPS for proximity reasons. No small effort dragging bags up and down escalators and stairs. In the end we were so glad we picked the hotel, it was like parking on the side of the road and walking to the hotel concierge.
We put our bags into the room and headed out for dinner at our favorite sushi bar. Was nice to down another 4 plates of salmon toro and enjoy the last bit of Hokkaido hospitality.
It was an early start the next day as we needed to be at the New Chitose airport for the 930am flight to Tokyo. Some of the Friday night crowd were still out on the Susukino streets as we rolled our bags between them.
Wished I had slept earlier, carrying the bags down to the subway platform drained all of me. Was mighty glad to finally hand over the two check-in bags to the airport guys.
Just a note here if you are flying Air Asia, we went to the Air Asia counters at terminal 2, who weighed our bags and confirmed our seats. But we had to move our bags to a common bag deposit area which seemed more like ANA counters. Looks like Air Asia is really new here and are still setting up for more permanent arrangements. Ah well, we just move our bags where they point.
No loose spare batteries in check-in luggage
There seems to be a big deal about Lithium ion and spare batteries too in your check in luggages. I read later on from the in-flight magazine the reason for the extra precautions. Lose batteries i.e. batteries that are not installed in the equipment they power, risk being shorted if the + and - terminals get connected accidentally with keys or metal objects. A short will heat up the batteries and could cause a fire in the cargo bay. Carry-on spare batteries are safer as you can do something about it if you see smoke coming out from the overhead compartment. Still it is advisable to put your spares in a plastic bag to avoid contact with metal conductors or cover the spare battery contacts with tape. Make sense to do the same if you have the habit of carrying spare camera or phone batteries in your rucksack or handbag.
Back in Tokyo
We were still in Hokkaido mood when we landed in Tokyo - every supermarket we went into had the 'bubble gum' grapes we enjoyed in Hokkaido. They were comparatively more expensive here in Tokyo. Before the trip, friend told us about these wonderful grapes and I was wondering what the big fuss was about till I tasted the first one. They are really sweet and 'bubble gummy' tasting.
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| Bubble gum grapes in Tokyo store |
We spent two nights in Tokyo and were mainly just lazing it out and were looking to visit Tsujiki for the unagi sushi we had when we first came. Unfortunately we went on Sunday morning and most of the shops and restaurants were closed.
So Sunday is clearly NOT the time to visit Tsukiji markets.
Still, despite most shops being closed, we managed to get some fantastic unagi rice and Tamago (egg omelette).
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| Grey Hibiya Train line to Tsujiki |
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| Tamago or omelette prepared layer by layer from underneath at a store in Tsujiki. |
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| 5 large chunks of salmon going for S$16 |
Typhoon in Tokyo
On Sunday night (30 September), typhoon winds arrived into Tokyo and stores closed early and the NEX trains to Narita were stopped. We only chanced upon the news as we entered a restaurant for dinner and the waitress explained that they were closing early and asked if we could finish in an hour. When we stepped out of the building, we were greeted with strong "body-displacing" winds and rain. There was still activity around in Tokyo but generally more toned down due to the typhoon. We were worried about our train and flight back to Singapore the next day but we woke up to a bright sunny day - the storm had passed over in the night.
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| All systems go the next day and we were bound for Narita in car No 4. |
So that was our trip to Hokkaido and Tokyo. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Here are some more links to great info that we used to plan for the trip. Some of them may be repeats from what I wrote above:
+Discussion on best times to visit Hokkaido -
http://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?2+14587
+ Hokkaido's official tourism website -
http://en.visit-hokkaido.jp/index.html
+ Discussion on tripadvisor on a self-drive holiday in Hokkaido - http://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/ShowTopic-g298143-i5078-k5114557-6D5N_Self_Drive_in_Hokkaido_September_October-Hokkaido.html
+ Guide to driving in Japan
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2022.html
+ Getting an International Driving Permit from AA Singapore
http://www.aas.com.sg/?show=content&view=8&val=135
+Hokkaido trains and timetable
http://www2.jrhokkaido.co.jp/global/english/ttable/
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