Snow Country

After such an exhausting Sunday we opted to lay around and consider our options on Monday. With this in mind, we slept late, took a short walk around the area to see what there was to do, and came to the conclusion that the answer was ‘not much’ on both counts. It appears that Toya is a popular Summer destination for people trying to escape the heat of more southern locations. It is really a very beautiful place, with a caldera lake (Lake Toya) where I believe that people go boating or fishing, mountains for hiking and camping, and of course the hot springs. In the Winter the place is practically deserted, with more than half of the stores closed up and a lot of snow. This explains why our hotel was so cheap. After our brief exploration and a stop at the convenience store for food we stayed in most of the rest of the day watching more television. Dinner was a ‘yakitori’ restaurant recommended by our concierge, and on our way back from dinner we found this sort of illuminated arch in the middle of the town that was really pretty. It’d be amazing to hold a party or something in a place like that, if, you know, it weren’t below freezing outside. Over breakfast that day we came to a decision: we were going to have to move. Our main reason for going to Hokkaido in the dead of winter was to see the Sapporo snow festival. Unfortunately, if we were to continue staying in Toya we were going to have to pay a considerable amount for day trips into the city, with 3 hours worth of commute each direction. When we decided that this was not a viable option we set about calling hotels and youth hostels listed in the ‘Lonely Planet’ travel book, and managed to find a hotel in the city that had about the same price as the place we were currently in. We managed to get rooms for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, but not Saturday, our last night in town. We’ll figure something out for Saturday night. It’ll be an adventure!
-Places in Hokkaido have heating in every room, shop and restaurant, which means that I am consistently warmer here than in Kyoto.
-Hokkaido cold is the dryer cold that I am used to from home, not the bone-chilling cold of Kyoto. It’s amazing to me that I can feel more comfortable in sub-freezing temperatures here than in snowless Kyoto.
-There are little hotsprings on the sides of the road here that have been made into hand, foot, and dog baths. It’s really very novel.
-Lonely Planet has good hotel information.
-Toya is going to be the site of this summer’s G8 summit, for which they are already preparing.