Trip to Hokkaido

Hello!

I recently took a trip up to Hokkaido, which is the northernmost main island of Japan. It takes about two hours to get there from Kobe via plane. Traveling by train takes at least a half day of riding, so it is better to fly up.

Temperatures in Kobe had been pretty hot, so I was hoping to get a break from the heat further north.

I flew into Sapporo. Sapporo is the largest city in Hokkaido and also home of the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team. This was Ohtani's team in Japan before he came to play for the Angels. I had wanted to see a game in Sapporo because the Fighters have Japan's newest baseball stadium, ES CON Field.

This is the first season of ES CON. It is very different from other Japanese stadiums as everything inside of it is modern and built more in an American style. It looks a lot like the Milwaukee Brewer's stadium. You can even watch the game from a hot bath within the stadium, but it cost about $50 to do that. So I ended up not doing that.

After the game, I spent the night in Sapporo and then took some time the next day to see different things in the city. One of the area attractions was the Olympic ski jump hill. I took a train that evening to the second largest city in Hokkaido, Asahikawa.

Asahikawa is located in the middle of Hokkaido about a 2 hour train ride from Sapporo. Nearby to Asahikawa is the highest mountain in Hokkaido, called Asahidake. Asahidake is part of Japan's "100 famous mountains" group.

I stayed in a smaller town in the country. This time of year is referred to as "Obon" in Japan - it's a very busy travel time as most Japanese workers have holiday at this time and use it to visit back home. My school was closed for several days. Hotels were initially hard to find so I was only able to find this country style inn to stay in.

I shared the first floor of the inn with several other people. You can see it in one of the photos, the outside is the white house. Inside you get a small mattress and sleep on the floor. I have had trouble sleeping on this type of floor in the past, but sleeping on this trip was not too bad.

To do the hike of Asahidake, I was planning to walk about 45 minutes to a bus stop and catch mountain bus to the hiking area. Most of the popular mountains have some sort of "hiking bus" that you can take from local train stations to the hiking trails. I have caught a few of these types of busses in the past. But, an older Japanese guy staying at the inn offered to drive me up to the start of the hike.

It looked cloudy and rainy as we started driving up the mountain but the clouds parted and it was quite sunny on the mountain itself.

I had prepared to only do about 3 hours of hiking, but when I got the mountain I saw there was a 7 hour train that made a loop around the area and let you see two mountain peaks. I decided to do that one.

After about 5 hours, I got to the top of Asahidake and made my way down. By the time I got to the bottom of the mountain at the end of the hike, the mountain was clouded over. I caught the bus, stopped at a hot spring bath in town and then went back to the inn to stay one more night.

That's about it for the first part of the trip. I'll write about the rest of the trip next week.

We still do not have classes at school. Teachers are spending their time preparing for the upcoming several months. I went to school for about a day after the trip and then went to a "summer school" activity. This is an event where all of the English teachers in Kobe come together and work with Kobe junior high school students. We mainly just do activities and games with them to give them a fun experience with English.

We will have about one more week off of classes and some more training activities before we start classes again a week from Monday.

You will find some pictures from Hokkaido by clicking the photo link below.

Until next time,