There will be a fairly lengthy preamble on this one, but it is necessary, because these two days were among the rarest form of my travel - planned on the fly. It's due to weather. Not weather in Sapporo, mind you - other than late night on the first of the two days, Sapporo has stayed dry, but weather in other parts of Hokkaido wreaking havoc. First, was rain towards the furthest South part of Hokkaido (near Hokate) forcing all cancalletions of the one specific Shinkansen I was supposed to take to get from Sapporo to my half-day hike and tour of Noboribetsu. Now, Noboribetsu itself had fine weather, as did Sapporo, but alas, there was no easy way to get there. Not to worry, as I just moved all the stuff I was planning to do in Sapporo on Wednesday (the second of the two days in this post) up a day.
But then what to do Wednesday? First I ruled out going to Noboribetsu since it seemed the train wouldn't be restored in time. I then panic booked a day trip to Biei & Furano - the lavender and farm fields in the rolling hills to the Northeast of Sapporo. This is one of the other popular day trips (Noboribetsu, and Otaru being others - of which I am still almost assuredly going to Otaru on Thursday). I chose Noboribetsu becasue of hiking, but called an audible. The only worry though was booking last minute, the tour I could book would have an estimated return time of 6pm, which is the same time as my tempura omakase dinner. So then I thought maybe I should rent a car, as I could drive there and back more quickly. In the end, that's what I did, but then came the actual day, where more issues came up.
Namely, the weather was expecting to be awful in Biei and Furano on Wednesday. Those sights didn't interest me as much of Noboribetsu in a vacuum, and the weather, and still risk of not making it back in time told me to rule that out. On a whime, I looked up weather in Noboribetsu, and alas it seemed fine until later afternoon, by which point I needed to be gone from there anyway, so I decided to take my rental and drive the 90 minutes down to Noboribetsu. And of course, whatever forecast I looked at was hilariously wrong, as it was raining hard for the back half of the drive. At first I held out some silly hope that it would clear by the time I hit Noboribetsu, but it did not. I cut my losses, had lunch there and then drove back, on what would be my final audible, which actually worked out ok. But more on that in the post about tomorrow.
Overall, these two days forced me to be nimble, which when you plan trips as meticulously as I like to, is not a great thing. However, I will say that given how much I travel, I have been miraculously lucky with weather. Now, there have been some notable exceptions - be it these two days, or what seems to be a messy forecast for Fukuoka next, or probabyl most notably when a typhoon forced me to chop two days and two cities from my 2022 Korea trip. But that Korea trip is a great example - after the monsoon cleared (basically as I landed) it barely rained for the next two weeks. I shouldn't complain, but in the moment it was annoying - and mostly because I'll be leaving Hokkaido not really seeing it at its best.
Anyway, with that long screed over, lets get to what I actually did. The first day of the two went to plan, only the plan was for a different day. The only downside, was this day had an 8:30pm dinner, and there really wasn't enough things to fill it. The morning actually I had planned to just walk around the last remaining city cetner garden areas, including the grounds of the Hokkaido University, which is well known for its rows of ginko trees. That was beautiful, adn the setting serene. Sapporo is a wildly green city. It was only after this travail did I go to the Sapporo JR Station and realize my train was cancelled.
After the mental gymnaistics and scenario planning so detailed above, I did get off my ass and get lunch at a nice lowkey sushi spot Yazaki, where a sushi master plates lunch sets one by one - which is why you are seated immediately, but then in my case told it will be 30 minutes. I get it though and its nice, the chef is just cutting each persons order one by one so you can eat it almost at the pace as if it was an omakase. It was still excellent, even if not the level of the sushi the past two nights. That said, I can't live on just having that level of sushi - and places like Yazaki are what make Japan great.
My afternoon was based on going to three museums within Sapporo (remember, thinking it would be raining on Wednesday, I had moved more outdoor sights to yesterday), but one of those was temporarily closed - the Modern Art Museum having full re-installations at the moment. My trek out to that part of town was not without value though, as my one shopping stop in Sapporo was there, a brilliant artist gallery of a guy that carves animals (mostly bears) out of wood. These are of all sizes, shapes, attitudes and price points and they are all cute, beautiful and just amazing. I ended up buying a couple small ones, already with a mindset where if I am to come back to Sapporo say in 5-10 years, I'll be something more sizable.
The two museums I did go to were interesting. First was the Sapporo Beer Museum, which is a museum about the brewery company that is the leading Japanese export (well, them and Asahi), and also a leading local product. The museum had an audio guide and detailed main room explaining in about 15 steps the history of the company, starting from its roots in teh 1870s when a local Japanese man went to study beermaking in Germany (around the same time similarly people were doing taht for wine, whiskey, etc.), to the creation of the company, to Japan privatizing it post war, and to the crazy change in advertising strategies over the years (from geishas to housewives to mostly men). It was fascinating, and they had a tasting room at the back where for $8 you can get a half-pint of the standard pour, their special Japan-only label, and one that tries to recreate their original 1920s formulation. Overall, it was a unique, informative way of presenting a beer museum.
The other museum was an aquarium, the AOAO which takes up three floors in a office building right in the heart of the city - right opposite one end of the covered shopping district. The AOAO is small, for an aquarium, but truly lovely. First, they know what sells - most of the top floor is penguins, and a lot of them being as adorable and floofy as always. The top floor also houses a ton of varieties of jellyfish, lit beautifully and overall just mesmerizing in their weirdness. The floor below that has about 50 small tanks of individual fish, eels, salamamders, urchins and much more - all of them really well presented.
As I had some extra time to kill, I went to Beer Koto, a nice little craft brewery a few blocks from AOAO, which had the same online ordering system and also had a nice set of appetizers, including a lovely charcuterie plate. On the whole, craft beer in Japan is still lagging behind other places, but is basically as good as South Korea at this point.
Dinner was at one of the many, many lamb Japanese BBQ restaurants, all bearing the name Genghis Khan. It took me until coming here to realize that this is actually the name of a specific preparation of lamb, and not just some weird Mongol-inspired name. The one I booked had good reviews, but was also fairly empty - no idea if it was a place any better than most of the others, but i figure they all have more or less the same menu. I had plates of the titular genghis khan preparation (salted and then doused in sauce), then lamb rump, roll (thin slice), loin and hormone (innards), and a mushroom sampler which was excellent. Overall, I will say I'm not sure why this lamb-only yakiniku version has taken over Hokkaido, as I think the beef ones are better, but it was fun for the novelty.
Also fun for the novelty were my night spots of Bar Owl & Rooster and Farben - the latter being right up there with Bar the Hubris from the night before - they too also served their menu as a 2x2 matrix of sweet v bitter and high abv v low abv, and it worked well. All of these bars are similar in strucutre - small, beautifully designed, beautifully crafted. No idea how one differentiates itself from another, but I did get closer to ansewring that question when I went on a lark to Rock Bar Fxxcked Up, a rock & metal bar run by an American and Japanese guy, with the American being the bartender this night, he mentioned that the hundreds of similar bars basically find a few locals and that becomes their running customer base day after day after day - and of course it is hard to build more beyond that but that generally since they are small locations and rent is cheap, it works. Either way, it does make me question of the advance researh I did actually helped find the best places. Either way, places like Farben, Bar the Hubris, and even Rock Bar Fxxcked Up are all nice, and make wandering the crazy, brightly-lit streets of central Sapporo a charm.
Day 7 - And Again???
I already did the preamble of the mess of the day at the start, so let's do a quick whistle-stop on what I did. The first thing is rent a car and get used to driving in Japan, which truly isn't all that difficult. This was my second time driving on the left side of hte road (Scotland in 2023 being the other) so I wasn't a complete amateur, and Japan drivers are exceedingly clam and normal, other than maybe a few fast driving folks on the expressway. The car does an annoying "Please Control Your Speed" message when you go ten km over the posted speed limit, but luckily as long as you stay above the speed limit, it doesn't just continue to do that.
The drive down to Noboribetsu was fine, running through forests and again makes you feel like you are driving in the Pacific Northwest. I did stay there for lunch (reached at 12 nearly on the dot) at a nice little seafood spot named Maruhira, which is one of the few noted restaurants in that part of Noboribetsu. The seafood set lunch, which was about eight pieces of delicate sashimi, rice, great shrimp-head miso soup, was excellent, as was their karaage (of which I had two of the five pieces, savings the others for midnight snack territory. From there, I googled what things I could actually look to do with the rest of my day. I scouted things on the drive back to Sapporo, as it seemed as you head clcoser to Sapporo, the weather gets a lot better. And that's where a splotch of green with a lot of purple "site" icons, sitting around 40 minutes south of Sapporo called the Takino Suzura Hillside Park. From there a bit North is an outcrop of Sapporo called Sapporo Art City. These were all outdoor sites for the most part, but of course that area was dry.
These ended up being all fairly fun and worth seeing and a bit odd that I missed them on my gathering of information on what to do in Sapporo the first time. Suzura Hillside Park is what it says, a large expanse of a park within the forests and hills. The main points of the park is a flower garden area which was beautiful, with four of five sections of vibrant, bright colors. Certainly the pictures you see of the flower parks near Furano are better, but this was a nice minimized version.
The next stop is a five minute drive from Suzura Park, and it is a series of three sites which are bizarre but beautiful. Bizarre because one is a series of Maori heads, about forty of them, and one of the others is a replication of Stonehenge. The Stonehenge one is a bit of a nothing, but the Maori one is at least visually stunning and also has some nice sculpture of deer and bears and stuff dotted around. Then there is the third site though called The Buddha Hill Temple, which is lovely. It's modern, its basically a white 20-foot tall or so buddha with a circular collapsing wall around it with four of five outcrops of sculpture on the circumference of the wall. It is stunning, replete in white stone and marble. It is serene. It is worth seeing and makes the trip out here worth it enough.
The last stop then was the Sapporo Art City area, which is a large expanse with two main features, one being teh Sapporo Sculpture Park and the other the Sapporo Art Museum. Starting with the Art Museum, it is another beautiful building outside, and inside showcases a really stunning series of art, animal sculptures, prints, etc., from famed Hokkaido artists. Sadly, they didn't allow photos and of course in Japan people respect that rule, so I had to avoid the urge of sneaking a few and just soaked it all in.
The Sculpture Park is another thing entirely and is wonderful. It is a medium sized expanse of forest with winding, interconnected paths with 72 sculptures dotted around. Some sculptures are of people or based on people, some are more modern and angular, some are kitschy, some are super intriguing. These were all interesting though and it is a fairly magical place, that sits just 30 minutes from city center. The Sapporo Art City is absolutely a must visit.
I made it back to the hotel with just enough to time to shower, rest for 15 and then head to one of the more intriguing dinners of my trip, a stop as a tempura omakase called Masa. Tempura is usually not something I go out of my way to eat, but that is silly American tempura which is often over fried, over battered, etc., This is different - with all the art, craft and care that I saw from the sushi masters Sunday and Monday, this was incredible. The first two dishes are non-tempura, are ways to warm you up. Then comes the tempura itself, first with shrimp, then some vegetables (okra, pepper, mushroom, pumpkin) and various fish, oysters, etc. All of these were so perfectly battered, so light, so brilliant. Also the produce and seafood itself was so perfect and fresh, from giant oysters to the sweetest pumpkin. The final dish, like in most kaiseki meals, is a rice bowl of salmon and corn (both tempura) and various greens. It was an incredible experience, and changed the way I look at tempura forever.
The only downside of the meal was it was at 6pm - Masa has a 6pm and 8:30pm seating, but only allows solo diners at the 6pm one. That meant I was done by 8:15, which is way earlier than needed to start my night. Did have to go back and repack somethings and what not, but from there headed first to Moon Sun (where I'm writing this) for some last few wonderful beers, and then checked out Farben and Bar The Hubris one last time, as those have been the two best of the five bars I went to in my time in Sapporo, and showcase again the care, refinement of this great little enclave within Japan - an enclave I saw way more of than expected, but luckily this was not a hugely negative thng.
