{"id":29772,"date":"2019-07-28T12:35:17","date_gmt":"2019-07-28T04:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=29772"},"modified":"2019-08-05T21:29:37","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T13:29:37","slug":"kanagawa-hokkaido-japan-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2019\/07\/28\/kanagawa-hokkaido-japan-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Kanagawa & Hokkaido\/Japan 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

We got royally cooked by the sun during our Maldives trip in June<\/a>. In fact, our girl quips that Daddy turned into crispy bacon, while she herself was fried into well-done steak – a reference to our respective Chinese zodiac signs! So, we wanted to head to colder climates again for our year-end trip. I was particularly interested in visiting Taiwan again after the fabulous trip we had in December last year, and this time cover the southern half of the island. However, the wife was less enthusiastic about it as she didn\u2019t want to do another Taiwan trip so soon after the last. So Japan it was. This will be on top of an earlier work trip I\u2019ll also be making to Japan in September. That trip will be 11 days long and centered on Ch\u016bgoku and Kyushu regions, and I\u2019ll write about my planning for that in a separate series of posts.<\/p>\n

Our planning process for the December family trip started comparatively late this time round, as I could only work out my leave plans at the end of July. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the late confirmation also meant I now had a fairly wide window of travel of about 3 weeks. A trip to Japan wasn\u2019t going to be cheap, so we had an eye out for the attractive flight prices on dates that would net us the longest stay we could manage before our two kids would get too tired and long for home. After the usual stalking and back and forth, we booked with Singapore Airways for a 15 day trip from mid-December and returning late December, and will be flying in and out of Haneda @ Tokyo.<\/p>\n

To be sure, we weren\u2019t initially intending to take a Hokkaido-centered holiday. Sure, the kids have handled temperatures just above zero during our Western Australia trip in 2017 and come out none for the worse. However, Hokkaido in winter is really<\/em> cold, even between mid to late December and well before the island routinely expects peak snowfall. We wanted our kids to see snow and try skiing for the first time, but just weren\u2019t sure if they were up to the traipsing around a snow-blanketed island for a week to make the expense of getting to Hokkaido worth it. Moreover, there are other spots in Honshu itself with ski resorts, and we figured we could approximate the same experience at one of these.<\/p>\n

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One early edition of the city-loop itinerary that included Tokyo, Kamakura, Yokohama, Hakone, Kawaguchiko, Nagano, and Nikko.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our early versions of the itinerary centered around making a city to city loop, and starting-finishing in Tokyo. One such loop in that plan would see us visiting Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura, Hagone, Kawaguchiko, Hakone, Nikko, and Nagano, with a couple of days spent in particular at the Nagano area and the ski resorts there. However, a check on past year records of snowfall showed that whether Nagano was going to see sufficient snowfall even towards the end of December was an iffy thing. So, our attention switched back to Hokkaido to see if we could manage making it the centerpiece of the trip. This was even though we\u2019d already booked flights in and out of Haneda, and SQ was going to charge us an arm and leg to change any part of the flight. It didn\u2019t take long before we realised that giving Hokkaido the attention it deserved – i.e. a week at the bare minimum – would take up the chunk of our 15 day span. We\u2019d have to nix most of the cities around Kanto in the earlier city-loop versions of the itinerary.<\/p>\n

We gave it a bit more thought, and concluded that if we\u2019re going to do Hokkaido, we’d have to that segment as much time as we could so that we won\u2019t feel compelled to do another follow-up trip in winter again anytime soon. So, after more intensive checking and researching in the last several days, we have a working itinerary – with accommodation bookings done at all places of stay, all of which are changeable until end-Nov without cost. Basically, we\u2019ll do five days in Kanagawa and Tokyo, followed by ten days in Hokkaido itself.<\/p>\n

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Revised edition centered around Tokyo, selected places in Kanagawa, and Hokkaido.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Comments!<\/p>\n

We especially wanted to see Mt. Fuji<\/strong>, and had to decide between Hakone<\/strong> or Kawaguchiko, two of the most well-known and popular places to see the mountain. One early version of our city loop itinerary included both with overnight stays at the two places even. Unfortunately, given that we have just five days now to spend in Kanagawa and Tokyo, it’d have to be one or the other. Generally speaking, Hakone is more interesting with other things to do besides eyeballing Mt. Fuji, while Kawaguchiko nets you a better view – but we won\u2019t have nearly as many other things to do at that spot. We also explored the idea of heading straight to Hakone immediately after landing at Haneda so that we have a full-day checking out Hakone, but have shelved it for the moment – though our accommodation bookings permit us to revisit this if we need to in the weeks to come.<\/p>\n

Kamakura<\/strong> has an interesting reputation: it’s considered to be the Kyoto of Eastern Japan. There are several places of interest in the old city, and many visitors do a day trip out of Tokyo to Kamakura, and follow a clockwise or anti clockwise loop of the key shrines, temples and sights there. Yokohama<\/strong> also has a delightful Cup Noodles Museum that we\u2019re sure the kids would love, and an impressive Chinatown area. The earlier city loop itinerary would have afforded us an overnight in Kamakura, and a full day also in Yokohama. But that also similarly got cut down to a day trip out from Tokyo where we\u2019d cover just the most important bits of both cities.<\/p>\n

Our initial three full days in Tokyo<\/strong> itself also got shrunk to just one day. The wife\u00a0 wants to check-out the Tsukiji Market at least, and for myself Shinjuku Gyoen and the Imperial East Gardens. We\u2019d have to work out a travel plan that includes the three and what else we can also squeeze in-between.<\/p>\n

In exchange for giving up what would had been an exciting city to city loop around the Chubu and Kanto regions, we\u2019d get Hokkaido<\/strong> for ten days. Hooray! We\u2019d be largely centered on the south\u2014westerly part of the island that\u2019d include Niseko<\/strong> – where we\u2019ve booked for a 3D2N stay at a small lodged-styled resort that hopefully won\u2019t see hordes of tourists – Hakodate<\/strong> for its incredible night-view of the city, Noboribetsu<\/strong> for its sulphur valley and Marine park, and also a relatively long stay in Sapporo itself that\u2019d permit us to cover the essential day trips – i.e. Otaru<\/strong> and Asahiyama<\/strong> – and also another day-trip to another ski resort near the city, and all still with time to spend checking out the city itself.<\/p>\n

Next post will center on my other Japan trip in September!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We got royally cooked by the sun during our Maldives trip in June. In fact, our girl quips that Daddy turned into crispy bacon, while she herself was fried into well-done steak – a reference to our respective Chinese zodiac<\/p>\n

Read More Kanagawa & Hokkaido\/Japan 2019<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[662],"class_list":["post-29772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-traveling","tag-kanagawa-hokkaido-japan-2019","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blog-hokkaido-winter.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}