It’s been three months since we’ve posted notes of our upcoming trip to Kanagawa/Hokkaido on account that the wife had been buried with marking, and myself with two work trips that’s taken place in the last few months – the second of which will be to Shanghai and starting next week.
Nonetheless, we’ve worked out a detailed hour by hour plan for each day of the 15 day. And over the long holiday weekend, also made a major revision to our itinerary. Here’s what it looks like now:
And the changes from the version from 3 months back in July:
We dropped Niseko – that’s the large revision we’ve decided on. That was a very hard decision to make, and came out of our re-checking all our accommodation options in the area, and also the wife’s dogged research on ski schools and activities in the area. Accommodation in the area is always expensive. And while we already had a reservation at Pensione Uno, the fact that the place isn’t actually near the ski schools and parks we shortlisted was a real bummer, the occasional bus services that operate in the area notwithstanding. There was also very large fee differences between ski schools offering lessons for children in Japanese vs English, with the latter commanding incredible premiums. I reckon that it’s a seller’s market for these services in well-developed tourist areas like Niseko and providers can charge whatever they wish. Given the fact that we’d just have one full uninterrupted day there and also cost of equipment rental, coupled also with some uncertainty – more on my part than the wife’s – whether our kids would even take to skiing to begin with, we concluded that a short trip to Niseko just wasn’t making sense. We’ll certainly want to try skiing in Hokkaido for sure at some point, but we’ll want a longer stay in the ski villages, an area that isn’t Niseko, and also when kids are older.
Dropping Niseko also meant we’ll have two additional full days to disburse around the itinerary. So, we added one day each to Sapporo and to Hakodate. The latter was particularly beneficial for my planning, as the July itinerary allocated just an evening and a following morning to the coastal town – which meant we’d be able to cover only sunset at Mt. Hakodate for the evening and also Asaichi Market in the morning. The additional day in Hakodate allows me to squeeze in the historical district at Motomachi, the lovely Onuma Quasi-National Park and lake that the park surrounds, and the star-shaped Goryokaku Park and Tower. Just for kicks, I’ve added Hakodate Botanical Garden where there snow monkeys gather for their onsen. Granted, it’s not a natural hot-spring like the one in Nagano, but since our itinerary doesn’t include a visit anywhere else to see these primates, the man-made exhibit in the Botanical Garden was the next best thing.
We still had to find a day in Hokkaido to visit a snow park though to let the kids get their fix. Our earlier itinerary listed Teine park, but we’ve since also added Takino Suzuran Hillside Park Snow World. The latter seems to offer a range of activities that Hannah and Peter might like more. We’ll decide which of the two parks to visit on-site.
We also added a tentative day trip to the two lakes in southern Hokkaido: Lake Toya, and Lake Shikotsu. That’s in part filler activities in case we don’t find something better to do – but the eight days we’re spending using Sapporo as a base really means we’ll be fairly exhausting the places in and immediately around the city we’re interested.
Winter illuminations around and near Tokyo are a real highlight for any winter trip to the country, with some of the best light-ups in the Shinjuku and Tokyo Station areas. Our place of stay though isn’t anywhere near either station – the closest main station to us is Shinagawa, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be featuring any significant light-ups from what we’ve checked so far. So, we revisited the five evenings we’ve got in Tokyo – four before the Hokkaido segment and one after that – to see which evening activities we can rearrange to check out the nearer illumination spots in Shinjuku and Tokyo Stations. In this updated plan, we’ll be exploring Shinjuku Station for at least one and likely two evenings, and one other evening at Tokyo Station.
To lower the very large transportation fares we’d be incurring, we’ve also been looking at a number of passes: the JR Tokyo-Wide Pass, Otaru Aquarium Pass, and the JR Hokkaido 4 Day Flex Pass. Of the three:
– The JR Tokyo-Wide Pass is used over three consecutive days, and costs ¥10,180. Our cost of travel over days 2 to 4 though amounts to slightly less than that, mostly on account that we’re only traveling a fairly long distance on day 2 to Hakone. Then again, a pass is convenient – so we’ll likely end up picking up the pass indeed when we arrive.
– We learned about the Otaru Aquarium Pass from a fellow blogger who also visited Hokkaido last year. The pass costs ¥2,770 and includes admission to the aquarium, and transportation from Sapporo to the Otaru and the aquarium. Pretty worth it, since we’ll be spending a full day in Otaru.
– JR Hokkaido 4 Day Flex Pass: this pass covers travel around the southern Hokkaido area and over four days that do not need to be consecutive. The pass will be easily worth it on account of the long train rides we’ll be chalking up: between Sapporo and Noboribetsu, from Sapporo to Hakodate, and from Hakodate to New Chitose Airport. We’ll have to order the pass before the trip, and the cheapest we’ve found so far is SGD275.
I’ll be writing about selected observations for my upcoming work trip to Shanghai next week, so further-on notes on this Japan trip will be end-Nov again. We might make more tweaks to the itinerary, including adding visits to winter illuminations in Hokkaido – there are a few around Sapporo Station and Odori Park – and also exploring whether it’d make sense to drop the half-day visit to Kamakura and replace it with more time spent in Tokyo. So, either way, more to come when I’m back from Shanghai!
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