Sapporo

We visited Hokkaido in 2002 and were awed by the beautiful scenery. We’ve talked so many times in the intervening years about going back, and it’s taken 6 years. Even though we are missing the peak tourist season, July, when lavenders flower, we figured there will be so many other things to see and experience.

The flight arrived early but the long queue at immigration ate away the time advantage. We wheeled our bags to the Toyota Car Rental counter only to discover that, hee, it’s affliated with Hertz. No wonder when we reserved online that it was so efficiently English. In a procedure that reminded us of Heathrow, we registered at the counter and then were taken by van about 5 mins’ drive offsite to the main rental location.

Our car was a Ractis, class P2 (similar to group B or C). For 8 days it was ¥75,600 including insurance. Automatic and came with GPS. I’d emailed them previously to ask for an English-speaking GPS and that was what we got. The people who got the car next to us at the parking bay obviously didn’t make that specification and had to change their car.

First thing I noticed when I got into the car, I didn’t know where the handbrake was. How embarrassing. Turned out it’s a foot pedal located where the clutch would have been if it were a manual car. :blush

Second thing about the GPS. It spoke English but the dashboard was still in Japanese. There were English instructions but we managed with the kanji anyway. Programming a location was dead easy - just key in the phone number!

The last time we’d rented a car on a long holiday was New Zealand, although I’d driven in the US in the last couple of years. But driving was easy, it helped that Japan is on the right side of the road and the roads are in good condition.

This first night we stayed at the Keio Plaza. Location was perfect, a few minutes’ walk from the JR station. We hadn’t booked all our nights for this trip, and were hoping that the tourist information office could help. We took bundles of brochures off to dinner to talk about options.

By the time we remembered that we had a car, we were at the ticket machines in the subway station. Hee. It was only 2 stops to Susukino the nightlife district. We had conveyer belt sushi and our first indulgence was to order a bunch of uni nigiri. Yummy. Dinner came to ¥3,276.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped off at Robinson’s (a decidedly un-Japanese name for a department store) and ogled at the displays of greenhouse fruits. Amazing. Artificial, but still amazing.

First impressions. Seemed to me that there are more tourists than we remembered, especially from other Asian countries. Hokkaido has always been the Japanese people’s best kept secret but now more and more people are learning about this. Sapporo probably isn’t the best example cos it’s the largest city and the starting point for visitors.

[Note: USD vs JPY is currently 109.597, but for quick rule of thumb use 100]