Hokkaido - The Siberian North of Japan (23.-25.12.08)

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Hokkaido is a special region in Japan due to its remoteness as island and harsh Siberian climate. It has a fascination due to its unspoiled and very wild national parks in summer and as a secure skiing destination for Korean, Taiwanese and Australian people in winter. Yuki developed some skills in finding cheap package trips. When she found a very reasonable priced package trip to Hokkaido, the place for our Christmas holidays was clear. We flew on the 23rd from Tokyo to Sapporo - the provincial capital of Hokkaido. Sapporo was cold with temperatures below freezing and plenty of ice on the street. Somehow nobody bothers and it is a big sliding on the crossings in the town. Some mini crampons are on sale in 24h shops, but we never saw somebody using them. We strolled around town and visited later the Sapporo beer museum. It was the first brewery in Japan and setup as a government initiative in 1876 from a brew master who had learned his profession in Berlin. The museum is hosted in the original red brick stone building and has a pleasant beer tasting bar. The walls of the bar are decorated with the advertisement posters since the existence of the brewery. Strangely beer drinking seems to be a Japanese women thing, since all older posters had beautiful beer drinking women as motive.
The next day was our snow board warm up day before a longer trip before New Year. We had clear skies with good views over the city and did a fairly amount of practicing falling leaves patterns and turnings. The turnings were a rather hard thing for Yuki, but we managed and had a nice day out in the beautiful winter landscape. We visited in the evening the Christmas market. Sapporo is the partner town of Munich and is one of the few cities with a real German style Christmas market. It is possible to get even German sausage and hot mold wine. The final treat of the day was a Christmas Eve sea food dinner at a local restaurant and followed by a relaxing time in the huge pool and sauna landscape of the hotel.
The next day we slept late and packed up to return to Tokyo. It would be nice to come back for the National parks in summer.

Practicalities: Package incl. flight, 2xhotel, 1xski pass, 2xspa 22000 Yen /person (≈175 Euro)

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