Bike tour of Hokkaido - seeing the sights

I gotta get out of this hot humid weather. Where better to go than the northern climes of that mysterious isle - Hokkaido.

Famous in the winter for its snow festival (-lots C thats not for me!) the summer offers both motorbikers and cyclists lots of adventure and wide open roads to breeze down and find that cool peaceful spot to take a moment and reflect of life or simply drink in the scenery.

You can get to Hokkaido from Osaka in a couple of ways: air, train or ferry. Here is a discussion of good advice about getting to Hokkaido. Cyclists might want to take a look at this post in particular.

I’m taking the Shin Nihonkai ferry (English) which goes from Maizuru to Otaru. I booked over the phone (06-6345-2921 only Japanese), and together with a scooter the return trip, including a 10% return discount) was Y26,000!

Cool! However the ferry leaves at 12.30am and arrives at 8pm the same day, so I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy starting my camping trip at night so I decided to spend the first night in a hotel. I did a lot of research but actually it was difficult to find many hotels in Otaru - Sapporo is about 1.5h away and I didn’t fancy driving there after a grueling ferry journey so I tried to find a hotel in Otaru - there are several but because it was Obon most were already approaching capacity even a month before. So, I wish I’d found this site which has a lot of hotel comparisons and makes booking hotels in Japan easy!

Anyways, I found a good deal through there and now have the first night’s accommodation sorted out. Now all I have to do is dust off my tent and pack all my stuff for the trip!