Hokkaido, Japan's Last Frontier - Part 4

After spending the day at Noboribetsu Onsen, I went to Sapporo to stay the night there. On my first day in Hokkaido, I had picked up a brochure showing some guided tours. There was one to Furano and Biei which have fields of flowers this time of year. And better yet, the full-day tour promised an English audio guide. I decided to go ahead and sign up for that tour for my last full day in Hokkaido.
I showed up in the morning, ready to go, imagining myself on a bus full of Japanese tourists who would listen intently to the tour guide, while I just put in my earphones and turned up the audio guide. I hoped I’d be next to someone friendly who would tell me what time to get back on the bus and other critical information. And I hoped for a window seat. So I was very surprised to get onto a completely empty tour bus! Well, I figured, we’ll probably stop at a hotel and pick up a tour group. I kept thinking this until our first rest stop, when it became very clear that I was the ONLY person on the tour! I had a huge tour bus all to myself, and two guides, neither of whom spoke English, and of course a bus driver.

At the rest stop, they wrote on a small white board the time we’d be departing. They gave me 20 minutes to go the bathroom. Obviously I was back within 5 minutes. I was a bit afraid we’d wait until the appointed time to leave (that would be very Japanese – to rigidly stick to the schedule), but we left as soon as the driver returned.
The audio guide was excellent. It was done by a Englishman who had been living in Sapporo for 17 years. He had some interesting anecdotes, like one about a department store which went a little overboard in decorating for Christmas and put Santa on a cross.
He described how agriculture in Hokkaido was developed. And how in the 1950 they began growing lavender to sell to Europe for perfume. Many many acres (230 hectacres at the peak) of lavender were planted and doing well for some time, until synthetic fragrances became popular in the 1970s. Then all the lavender farms began to go out of business. There was one remaining farm, Farm Tomita, and a picture of the farm happened to put into a 1976 JR calendar.

Then everyone saw the beautiful scenery and decided to visit. That’s all it took. Now Farm Tomita is a major tourist destination – a bit like lavender Disneyland. They have everything lavender, even lavender flavored ice cream, which I didn’t try. (I’m still getting over the perfume flavored gum I had in Okinawa.)

It was even complete with a little lab-like setting where this woman in a lab coat wrapped soaps in plastic wrap.
After an hour at Tomita Farm, I hopped back on my private tour bus and we continued on to Flower Land. First I was served a plough grill lunch.

It was very interesting – a hoe blade over a little sterno burner. As a foreigner, I wasn’t trusted to cook my own meal, so they piled it on the plough and covered in tin foil and told me to wait. It was really good – lots of cabbage, with some bean sprouts, eggplant, carrots, corn, mushrooms, and a piece of salmon, a big shrimp, and a couple of clams. After the huge meal, I was served a piece of melon for dessert, and then was free to wander around Flower Land for an hour. There was a little wagon ride around the flowers where I took these photos. Mostly that was all there was to do, unless I hadn’t seen enough lavender products at Farm Tomita.
I got back on the bus a few minutes early and we headed back to Sapporo with just a couple quick stops along the way. One stop was to see some famous trees. Some trees in Hokkaido were made famous by TV commercials. For instance, we drove slowly past the Ken and Mary tree, famous from a cigarette commercial. We drove by another tree famous from a car commercial. There were parking lots at these trees and people posing under the trees. I tried to imagine a tree in a American commercial enjoying such popularity, but I couldn’t. It’s kind of sweet how the Japanese people get so excited about trees in commercials. But kind of odd, too.
We stopped for another rest break near Biei town. I had flashbacks driving through Biei. It literally could be ANY small town in the Midwest (USA). Any town! There were even setbacks and buried power lines. Unbelievable!

The area around Biei is famous in Japan for its scenery and a famous photographer or painter has done some famous pictures of the area. It was nice, but really it could have been anyplace in the Western US, particularly the foothills of Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We stopped for a photo opportunity and my guides encouraged me to take my camera along. I wandered to the rest room and back to the bus, not bothering to take any photos. They urged me again to take some photos. I told them “Amerika wa onaji desu”. America is the same and they thought that was the most entertaining thing they’d heard all week. I heard them repeating it to each other on the way back to Sapporo.
All said, it was a good day, and the audio guide was really informative. But it took me an hour or two to get over the guilt of having a tour bus all to myself. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me I was the only one and they’d have to cancel. Or just having a policy of a minimum number of people. I can’t imagine why they sent me alone in that huge tour bus. I hope they don’t do that regularly.
The next day, I took a quick walk through the botanical garden in Sapporo. Lonely Planet said it was a must see, but I’m not sure what exactly was a “must see”. The highlight for me was this “Canadian Rock Garden”. Who knew that there was a Canadian style of rock gardens?

My flight back to Kobe was at midday, so that wrapped up my little trip to Hokkaido. It was a great trip, all in all.
My next big trip will be to Korea in a couple weeks. I don’t know how much of the country I’ll be able to see in a week, but stay tuned!