Two of the popular lakes for sightseeing in Hokkaido are Shikotsu, and Toya, both of which are located in Shikotsu-Toya National Park. Both are reachable from Sapporo through good road connections, but because of the amount of driving involved – two hours for instance from Sapporo to Lake Toya – many visitors seem to opt for a bus tour that covers both lakes in a loop. That’s basically the arrangement we booked through JapaniCan – the loop would bring us to three major places: Sapporo => Lake Shikotsu => Lake Toya => Mt. Usu => Sapporo. Both lakes are apparently created from ground collapses from volcanic activity, so are caldera-type lakes.
Brief comments about the day trip:
The winter version of the tour took off from Sapporo Bus Terminal at 7:40AM sharp, and we were brought back to Sapporo stop at just after 6PM. The cost of the day tour is quite attractive: it was ¥24,800/SGD307 for the four of us – two adults and two children – and includes a pretty filling and decent lunch, and also tickets to ascend Mt. Usu via ropeway.
The bus commentary was in Japanese though, though the guide was able to manage a small amount of English to pass along key bits of information – i.e. what time we needed to be back at the bus at each stop.
The duration we had at each stop was a bit of a mixed bag:
– 30 minutes at Lake Shikotsu was not nearly enough. You barely have time to walk down the slope from the bus drop-off point to the shoreline, look around for ten minutes, and then you’ll need to head backup.
– 90 minutes for Lunch @ Toyako Manseikaku Hotel Lakeside Terrace, which includes any time you might want to spend at the hot springs (at your own cost), but we opted to explore Lake Toya instead. The time we spent here is sufficient to get a sense of what the place is about.
– 90 minutes at Mt. Usu, including the ropeway and time to spend at both observation areas at the summit. That’s enough time – unless you also opt to do the optional visit to the Bear Park, though Tripadvisor is replete with reviews noting the dismal state of the park.
There are a couple of other brief stopovers; including at Silo Observatory for a different view of Lake Toya, Mt. Usu and Mt. Showa Shinzan. But this was the last visitation for the day at 4PM, and with sunset starting, the kids were too tired by this point to step out in the freezing cold for a look. there are also two rest-stops: one in the morning at Konoko Okoku (Mushrom King Otaki), and the other on our journey back (Nakayama toge).
In all, can’t complain about this bus tour, especially considering the low price we paid.
Pictures! Lake Shikotsu first:
Lake Toya:
Continued in the next post where we went up Mt. Usu!
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