I recently travelled to Hokkaido with my family and we traveled around with a rented car from city to city. Aside from enjoying a good daily onsen in our hotel, here’s some of my favourite attractions in Hokkaido!
1. Noboribetsu Bear Park
I’ve always love feeding animals as part of a travel itinerary so it’s only normal that I am including this into my top favorites. We had to take a cable car up to the mountains which took about 10 minutes. The main highlight was bear feeding but we actually stopped by to bet on a duck race for 200 yen. No joke. It was surprisingly quite fun but we lost in the end.
For bear feeding, you can purchase the treats from the vending machine. We bought 2 packets of 30 pieces for 500 yen each which was very reasonable. One of the bear was super funny and smart, it kept giving us sexy poses to attract our attention for treats (I bet it’s the same bear on the poster that was given a personality called sexy pose). It would actually wave at us to signal that he’s ready for us to throw the treats into his mouth. Meanwhile, there was another bear that was more timid and shy, it was afraid of taking the treats that were nearer to other bears, and we tried to give it more since it was a little pitiful. You need to have decent aiming skills though, otherwise the treat may drop into the water or far away from them and will be stolen by the crows. I think my skill was not bad – I had about 80% success rate hahaha.
Watch my video here.
2. Otaru Shopping Street
Otaru music box museum is quite famous around this area, and I’m surprised at how they are not charging admission fee for this. Probably because it functions more like a souvenir shop so people can come and go as they please. There are DIY workshops but we didn’t have time to explore that unfortunately.
If you continue down the shopping street, there are many souvenir shops or specialty cafes like Letao. We even bought our family chopsticks with our individual zodiac signs with free name engraving. You can easily spend a couple of hours here if you enjoy shopping for souvenirs or cute stuff in general. There are also a few character themed cafes in the area, and we visited the Hello kitty cafe. We ordered an Iced Caramel Latte and it came with a Hello kitty latte art design. Other themed cafes include Snoopy Cafe and a Miffy shop that sells merchandise and snacks.
3. Farm Tomita at Furano
This place is 10/10 if not for the scorching sun, and somehow it also happened to be one of the hottest days ever throughout the entire travel. My brother even jokingly claimed that this was his least favourite attraction because of the heat. The main highlight was the Lavender field which is close to full bloom season. It’s definitely a hit tourist spot as we heard many tourists who are from Singapore and Hong Kong. The flowers were not my favourite part of the attraction though.
On the other side of Farm Tomita, it’s a melon heaven for melon lovers as you get to enjoy fresh melon fruits, desserts and soft-serve. Honestly, I don’t really eat melons in Singapore because they’re either too expensive or bland with a hard texture. The melons at Hokkaido were all so juicy and soft. Japanese desserts in general are superior to begin with, the melon flavours just enhanced everything completely. We also jokingly low-key judged people who order milk soft serve rather than the melon flavours.
4. Furano Cheese Factory
DIY workshops are one of our family favourites as it is a fun (competitive) bonding session where we compete with each other to see who makes the best items (especially when it comes to food-related activities). We tried out all 3 types of workshops at Furano Cheese Factory which cost about SGD 10 per workshop and each session lasts about 45-60 minutes each. The steps were all very simple but it was so fun to make your own butter, ice-cream and cheese from scratch.
My favourite activity was making my own butter, somehow it had the simplest steps but was also the most tedious. (I was so glad to complete some arm workout that I was so deprived of during the holiday trip). And thanks to my boxing training and baking experience which requires arm stamina, I managed to be the first to complete it.
Which is your favourite attraction in Hokkaido?
