Sapporo, Hokkaido 7-Day Trip
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| Sapporo TV Tower |
Day 1 Getting to Sapporo
We've finally visited the last of Japan's four main islands: Hokkaido! Our main destination was Sapporo, the largest city on the island. There's no Shinkansen that can take you there from where we are located (not yet anyway). Instead we took a domestic flight to New Chitose Airport. We had some delicious Hokkaido-style miso ramen in the airport's ramen area, and then had an hour bus ride to Sapporo.
Day 2 Sapporo TV Tower
Sapporo TV Tower is 483 feet tall and was built in 1957 by the same architect that was involved with Tokyo Tower. The tower is located in Odori Park which is one of the main venues for the famous Sapporo Snow Festival every February! It's so popular that if you want to go, it is recommended to make reservations months in advance. Since we weren't visiting during that window, though, we didn't have to schedule things too far in advance.
From the TV Tower we walked to the Sapporo Clock Tower. This building was built in the 1870s with the help of the American government. The building is a Western-style building and was one of the first structures created in the city when Japan expanded its control over Hokkaido in the 19th Century. It was originally an administrative center, but today is largely a tourist attraction. The clock is still maintained and chimes every hour.
Hokkaido is where beer first got started in Japan and Sapporo has the only beer museum in the country. Sapporo Beer has been brewed there since 1877. The museum is free to enter ,but there are also paid tours that include beer tasting.
Additionally, the museum complex has several beer gardens, halls, and restaurants. In the beer halls there are all-you-can-drink and all-you-can-eat Genghis Khan for 120 minutes. Genghis Khan (Jingisukan / ジンギスカン in Japanese) is a popular local dish of grilled mutton that you cook on a convex skillet in front of you along with vegetable like beansprouts, onions, mushrooms. We splurged and ate a lot of meat there!
Day 3 Sapporo Beer Museum
We ran into a friend from Himeji who also happened to be visiting Sapporo at the same time! It was quite the coincidence and we met up briefly to grab a coffee together at Starbucks during our overlapping stay.
Our plans for this day were mostly just going to Shiroi Koibito Park, a chocolate factory and theme park. They have a free area of shops, cafe, and restaurant and also a paid area of chocolate exhibits. Probably their most famous item is the Shiroi Koibito cookie, which is made of two thin butter cookies with a layer of white chocolate in between them. There are workshops where you can try to make your own cookies. The theme park has a Tudor architectural style to it and includes an English style garden as well.
Day 4 Hokkaido University Botanic Gardens and Nakajima Park
The Hokkaido University Botanic Gardens are some of the oldest gardens of their type in Japan. Although it is run by the university, the public is welcomed to enjoy the garden for a small fee. It opened in 1886, and also has a small history museum that displays many Ainu artifacts. The Ainu are indigenous people who originally inhabited an area including much of Hokkaido. They were colonized by Japan in the 1800s and forced to adopt Japanese language and culture. In 2008, there were only 100 native Ainu speakers, although there have been recent efforts to revitalize the language and culture.
For lunch, we decided to head to Nijo Market. It's a popular market to shop for fresh seafood. What better place to get a delicious salmon donburi bowl and melon ice cream for dessert!
In the evening, we went Nakajima Park. It was close to our hotel and the park has a large pond, the Sapporo Astronomical Observatory, the Hokkaido Museum of Literature, a Japanese Garden, Hasso-an (a tea house), and the Hōheikan historical building. We didn't get to see all of the park, but we enjoyed a nice stroll around the pond area.
Day 5 Otaru Day Trip
Otaru is a coastal city located northwest of Sapporo that can be reached in about 30 minutes by train. Otaru served as a major port in Hokkaido's past. Right by Otaru Station is a fish market and just a 10 minute walk from there you can find Otaru Canal. The canal was restored in the 80s and now is a nice area to wande around and check out museums, restaurants, and shops.
Day 6 The Historic Village of Hokkaido
To get to the Historical Village of Hokkaido we took a train from Sapporo station to Shin-Sapporo Station and transferred to a bus that took about 15 minutes to get to the village. The "village" is an open air museum where a lot of historical buildings from the Hokkaido area have been relocated. In total it has about 52 buildings whose origins span the the Meiji and Taisho Periods (1868 to 1926). The buildings are organized into different areas like a town, a fishing district, a farming area, and a mountain. In the farming area, we ran into a volunteer that showed us some straw crafts!
Day 7 Mount Moiwa
Mount Moiwa is in Sapporo and you can get there by taking the streetcar to Ropeway Iriguchi Station, and from there walking about 5 minutes to a cable car station. You can see a nice view of the city from the top of the mountain. They also have live cameras on YouTube. When we saw this we sent the link to our family and waved to them from the mountain top. We left before sunset, but we've heard that they are beautiful to see from there.
To wrap up the day, we visited a small Olympics monument adjacent to Odori Park. It is a very small park area next to the TV Tower that is dedicated to Sapporo's 1972 Winter Olympics. We didn't know about the park before going, but saw it from the TV Tower observatory and we were curious to check it out before leaving the city.
Day 8 Return to Himeji
Our final day was mostly a long trip back to Himeji. We flew into Kobe and got an aerial shot of Akashi Kaikyo Bridge! We've seen the bridge from the ground many times and even went over it on a couple of occasions, but we've rarely if ever seen it from above.
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