Road Trippin around Hokkaido, Japan: Furano, Biei & Asahikawa
- Aye Mon
- Jun 14, 2020
- 11 min read
My first road trip ever! In a beautiful countryside no less, which made it an ever so memorable one.
If you ever explore these areas in the Hokkaido region during spring or summer, a road trip would be strongly recommended. For one, you truly learn a lot from planning a road trip, as well as making a barrage of silly mistakes and attempting to clean up your messes. Well in any case, you won’t be able to get around these areas without a car so 😛(unless you go in a tour but that’s lame).
For this road trip, we were based in Asahikawa, and drove out daily to Furano and Biei in our rental car (more on that below!). Asahikawa is more city-like with amenities, good accommodation etc. whereas Furano and Biei have more ulu countryside roads that are peaceful to drive around in the day but likely quite creepy at night.
We visited this region in end May (17-20 May), which is kinduf the period of transition from spring to summer. Over in Hokkaido you don’t see the cherry blossoms anymore, and the flowers start to bloom - but the keyword here is start to. The slight downside would be that we did not see hills and fields literally carpeted with flowers like you see in the ads - there were flowers, yes, but some fields were slightly patchy. x) Weather wise, it was amazing. It was pretty much aircon weather (12-16°C), so we generally wore long-sleeved tops and bottoms without any Heattech layer underneath. However it does get chilly in the early morning and towards the night, so do bring an extra jacket.
Itinerary
Day Zero (17th May, Fri): Arrive in Asahikawa
Take the plane for the whole day from SG → Tokyo → Sapporo and train to Asahikawa
Check in at Court Hotel Asahikawa and KO
Day One (18th May, Sat): Furano
Pick up rental car near Asahikawa Station (after much struggle)
Farm Tomita (Lavender Farm)
Furano Cheese Factory
Ningle Terrace
Random stop by at Trick Art Museum
Dinner at Asahikawa Ramen Village
Day Two (19th May, Sun): Biei
Shirahige Waterfall & Shirahige Blue Pond
Shikisai no Oka (Hills of Seasonal Colours)
Daisetsuzan Asahidake Ropeway
Ueno Farm (The Gnomes’ Garden)
Dinner at Asahikawa Ramen Village again :”)
Day Three: (20th May, Mon): Asahikawa + Travel to Sapporo
Asahiyama Zoo
Take the bus to Sapporo~
Day Zero (Fri): Arrive in Asahikawa
It was a heck of a long day of travelling, taking the plane from Singapore Changi Airport to Tokyo Narita Airport, transferring at Sapporo New Chitose Airport, then taking a long train ride from Sapporo to Asahikawa station. When we finally arrived at Asahikawa, we couldn’t wait to check into our hotel, Court Hotel Asahikawa.
Court Hotel Asahikawa
9 Chome 1 Jodori, Asahikawa, Hokkaido 070-0031, Japan
Price: SGD$54/night for a private room for two
Room Type: A cosy room with queen sized bed and private bathroom (with a bathtub and shower). The towels, toiletries typically provided by a hotel are all there as well. The room is also big enough for two to be able to open up your luggages comfortably at the same time (but you gotta close it right after to have enough walking space lel).
Location: We really loved the convenient location - it is only a 4min walk from Asahikawa station! Was a really easy place to find too, you literally just walk straight all the way from the station’s main entrance/exit.
Amenities: Breakfast wasn’t included but there are plenty of convenience stores between the train station and the hotel so we never had to worry about our meals. In case you’ve yet to try Japanese convenience store food, in short, it’s great and it’s all you need. There’s also a parking lot for you to park your car, via a really neat and efficient system as you can see below. Rest assured that the staff will help you drive it into the area with ultimate parking precision, so less confident drivers like myself don’t have to fret either. ;)
Day One (Sat): Furano
We set off really early the next day, bought some breakfast and snacks at the convenience stores nearby, and walked towards Asahikawa station to pick up our rental car.
Our Rental Car 🚗
We rented it via the Rental Cars online site, and it cost SGD$200 (including insurance for theft, accidents, etc.) to rent the car for two days. There are cars of varying prices, models and sizes on the site for you to choose form, and you can also select your desired pick-up time and location (usually a train station / airport). Remember to apply for an International Driving Permit ahead of time too, and bring your SG license to Japan as well. ;) And don’t worry about paying for parking because land is abundant, and we got to park freely at all the carparks of the places we visited. /0/
Picking up our Rental Car 🚗
So we were at the station. Then we realised - we had no idea where to find our rental car. 🙃We had with us a confusing A4 sized receipt, and after some time we found a line in small print indicating to “meet the person with our car at a roundabout”. We found the roundabout at the back of the station, and we waited, and waited (but we were kinda late…) - and we had no way to contact the stated numbers either, as our phones were not able to dial local numbers. We went around asking lots of questions to lots of locals who barely spoke any English, but were all really nice to us and tried their utmost to help us :”) The true MVP was the kind train station uncle who made a few calls and managed to get in touch with the driver who was coming to pick us up!! This was already about 45mins past the predestined pick-up time, but oh boy were we glad to finally see our driver. Certainly making sure to check these things thoroughly the next time - don’t be stupid like mi friends. 🙂
The driver then brought us to the official car Rental Cars store, where they briefed us about using the map code, gave us a folder with the traffic rules of Japan, and informed us to top it up to a full tank of gas before returning the car. To get around, all you have to do is key in the map code that corresponds to your desired location into the GPS, and you can drive to your destination with ease! The map codes were accurate and didn’t cause us any problems throughout the trip, which really made navigation a breeze. :)
And finally we hit the road! The serenity of the surroundings and the picturesque views we observed on the trip was simply amazing. I particularly loved the snow capped mountains that were always observable in the distance.
Farm Tomita
We first headed to Farm Tomita, a lavender farm. The lavenders weren’t in full bloom yet (the photo above was just one zealous patch of land), so we just walked around hunting for spots that were cute for photos, as usual. It was kinda nice that there weren’t too many tourists though. :) Although as we were about to leave, there was a bus full of tourists who arrived.
Scroll for photos of the farm, greenhouse and random lone (and depressed-looking) cherry blossom tree:
We also took a break and had some lavender flavoured snacks at the cafe, and purchased some lavender flavoured/scented products at the souvenir shop. Yes, pretty much everything at Farm Tomita was lavender in colour/scent/taste - but not complaining cuz I love it.
Furano Cheese Factory
We then headed to the Furano Cheese Factory, where there was a cheese factory, a souvenir shop on the second floor, as well as a cafe. We were more conservative with our purchases considering that it was only the first day of the trip, so I didn’t start to binge buy (yet). Moreover, they are pretty famous for dairy products, which we unfortunately couldn’t bring back all the way to SG since we would be travelling for quite a while more. But we did taste a good number of delicious cheese samples! The fish flavoured cheese was extremely weird but - try everything once right?
We enjoyed some milk at the souvenir store, and headed to the restaurant for some ice-cream too.
Also fact: my purple hair stained my white top which I had to handwash at the end of the day. What a genius wearing white tops (turtleneck some more) three days after dyeing my hair...
We had wanted to have some jumbo sized sushi for lunch at Fukuzushi, a restaurant near the Furano Cheese Factory, but I don’t remember why we were somehow not hungry yet. So we simply headed straight to the next destination - Ningle Terrace.
Ningle Terrace
Ningle Terrace is a quaint little village with lots of wooden cottages, each one of them a shop selling various types of handmade arts and crafts. Pretty much all the shops do not allow photography so unfortunately can’t share any images of the lovely crafts here. As most products were handmade and pretty expensive, and since we weren’t much of such collectors of craft, we didn’t make any purchases. But we mostly went around to capture some photos. :)
The cottages are really quite pretty, but if you’re not too big a fan of such handicrafts, it should be okay to give this stop a miss.
Trick Art Museum
On our way back to Asahikawa, we chanced upon a neat looking place from our car and wondered what that was, so we just stopped by and parked. Turns out it was a Trick Art Museum. We had been to such museums before elsewhere and didn’t bother entering, but managed to find some amazing photospots right outside the museum! Would recommend you drop by for this amazingly photogenic area. :D
This photo depicts the abundance of parking space everywhere \0/
and also happens to feature the Trick Art museum
Asahikawa Ramen Village
We finally got hungry, and decided to grab some dinner at Asahikawa Ramen Village. You would be pretty spoilt for choice as there are plenty of shops, but we decided not to fret too much and just walk in to any shop - my previous trip to Japan had proven that it is almost impossible to consume bad food in Japan. And true enough, we had an amazing meal!
As we thought it might be dangerous to drive around in the dark, we tried to head back to our hotel before the sun set (sunsets in late May range from around 640-7pm ish).
Day Two (Sun): Biei
Shirahige Waterfall &
Shirahige Blue Pond
To start off day two, we headed to one of the iconic destinations of Biei - the Shirahige Waterfall and Shirahige Blue Pond in the Shirogane Onsen village of Biei. The Blue Pond was definitely the most crowded with tourists out of all the destinations that we had been to. Nonetheless, there was still plenty of space to stand around comfortably to get a shot of the gorgeous pond.
Isn’t it such a gorgeous teal colour~~ okay I’m kinda scamming y’all with edits though. :P The real life colour of the pond is more towards a minty green shade like:
Okay sorry for my noob edits in VSCO that resulted in inconsistent colours whoops.
After touring around the pond area, we headed to see the beautiful Shirahige Waterfall that supplies water to the Shirahige Blue Pond, and is just a short walk from the pond.
Shikisai no Oka
Our next stop was Shikisai no Oka a.k.a. Hills of Seasonal Colours. Like Farm Tomita, the flowers here weren’t in full bloom yet and the gardeners were still really hard at work planting the seeds and all :”) so the place looked a little something like:
But of course, with some good framing, you can still make the place look awesome with photos like these ;)
The place is really hilly, so be prepared to walk up and down several hills and burn off those calories. You can also choose to rent a little tractor and drive it around but most people were just walking, including us.
Our next destination was a bit more ulu, but I really wanted to check it out anyway as I was expecting this:
But turns out, it was the wrong time of the year, and instead, it looked like…
Daisetsuzan Asahidake Ropeway
Behold, the Asahidake mountain in all its glistening white snowy glory! This destination is called the Daisetsuzan Asahidake Ropeway, and is a part of Daisetsuzan National Park. Hiking enthusiasts would be happy to explore many other areas of the national park (in the appropriate weather), but of course I was a lazy bloke who would opt for the ropeway regardless. And boy, we were the only visitors on that cable car besides one fit senior Japanese couple decked in full-on ski gear. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful sight and kinda felt like I was in Switzerland with its alps and all.
As we ended up spending quite a short while at the Daisetsuzan Asahidake Ropeway winter wonderland, we had quite a bit of time left. Hence we headed towards Ueno Farm (The Gnomes’ Garden).
Ueno Farm
This was a destination that we had initially deemed to be optional to visit as it was a bit ulu. There were a few locals there when we arrived at the quaint little English-style garden, but it was generally still quiet and empty. Would say this garden was quite pretty! Definitely glad to have dropped by.
For dinner, we hit the Asahikawa Ramen Village yet again as we really missed the ramen. Then it was time to bade goodbye to our car which had served us so well for two days. So we first headed to a patrol station to top up to full tank (don’t remember how much it cost but we fumbled with the machine quite a bit as it displayed only Japanese - wish I had seen this video before we went to Japan lol), then headed to the Rental Cars store to drop off our car. :”) They drove us back to Asahikawa Station, and we walked back to our hotel from there.~
Day Three (Mon): Asahikawa + Travel to Sapporo
Just like that, it was already the last day in Asahikawa. :( We checked out of the hotel early and left our luggage at the concierge area, and headed to the Asahiyama Zoo via bus (you can take bus 41, 42 or 47 from Asahikawa Station). Now, the Asahikawa station has like 8 or 9 bus stops - or more - but basically, different buses stop at each of the bus stops although they’re all at the same station, so we tried to be more careful, and looked for the correct bus stop as well as the correct destination name on the bus stop sign board the day before. 😎 #preparedaf #dasrite We tried to be careful as our bus that would take us all the way to Sapporo was at one of the bus stops, and we certainly didn’t want to board the wrong bus to another state or scramble to find the bus at the last minute….
Asahiyama Zoo
Anyhoo, we arrived at the zoo and got to check out plenty of cute animals. In fact the Asahiyama Zoo is a bit more fun to visit in the winter, as you can have more interactions with the penguins! If you’re a fan of that, go for it wew. Here are some of the unique breeds and qtpies that we noticed - who knew I'd ever see the stork in Chinese paintings irl one day!
(hehe)
And then we headed back to our hotel to grab our luggage (I actually almost forgot about collecting the luggage before heading to Sapporo, omg…), and boarded the bus to Sapporo. The bus we took was called the Asahikawa Eki Mae (the bus stop only indicates the Japanese name 札幌駅前ＢＴ行 so do note that down), which brought us to Sumikawa station in Sapporo within 3 hours. It cost ¥2310, which is cheaper than the Shinkansen that cost ¥5060 for a 2 hour trip. ;) If I remember correctly, I think you have to pay the fare only when you get down from the bus, as per most buses in Japan.
That’s a wrap for the road trip within Furano, Biei and Asahikawa. Road trips for this region are seriously highly recommend if there’s at least one driver in your group. :) Even though planning can never be perfect, even though all sorts of silly, careless mistakes will inevitably be made along the way - travel is great, and you learn so much from it. ☺️
Looking forward to the world reopening soon. :”)
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