Riding the Roads of Hokkaido
 

Words & Photos: Jane Shearer

Hokkaido is a perfect cycle touring destination if you love camping, the outdoors and good food. Having investigated South Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia in the last few years, and western China a decade ago, we wanted to ‘complete’ our set of East Asian countries.

I started planning our trip by realising I knew little about Japan’s geography. Japan has 14,125 islands but only four large islands:

• Honshu is the biggest, most populous and includes Tokyo. Honshu is connected to the other three big islands by tunnels and bridges.
• Kyushu is the southern-most island.
• Shikoku is the least populated island and is immediately south of Honshu.
• Hokkaido is the northernmost island with 5 million of Japan’s 123 million people.

Hokkaido appealed as a good size (around 300km west to east and north to south) for a three-week cycle tour. It was also likely to be a pleasant cycling temperature in late September – October. In 2024 we made the mistake of thinking Taiwan would cool down in October and sweated our way around that island. Hokkaido in autumn turned out to be perfect – we arrived to 26 degrees Celsius, which rapidly dropped to 20-22 degrees for most of our stay, ending up in the high teens as we finished our tour in Sapporo. We experienced a bit of rain but only a couple of notably wet days.

Given timing of flights, the best logistics solution was to catch the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo to Hakodate, in the southwest of Hokkaido. We took a train from Narita airport to the main Tokyo station then dragged our bike boxes through the seething concourse where there was little information about where to go and few people to ask. However, the stress ended once the train arrived. With bikes safely stowed behind the rear seats in the carriage, we relaxed, ate the bento boxes we had bought at the station and watched villages, volcanoes and green leafy vegetation pass beyond the window. You can take bicycles on Japanese trains as long as they are boxed or in a ‘rinko’ bag – a bicycle cover with the front wheel removed.

From Hakodate we started our tour on our Surly Ogres. We left our Bombtracks at home for the first time in several years because we knew most of our cycling would be on sealed roads with only a few gravel roads thrown in. The options for off-road are limited because recent typhoons have taken out a lot of the forestry tracks suggested in the best-ever cycle touring (and hiking, skiing and sea kayaking) web guide provided by two ex-pat kiwis teaching in Hokkaido Universities. However, there are plenty of on-road options to explore and we didn’t mind the idea of an easier cycle ride after Mongolia in June-July. On our Big Apple Schwalbe 50mm tyres, we flew along the roads in a way impossible on Mongolian tracks or with 2.8-inch Maxxis Rekons. We averaged 100km a day over our three-week trip and had only one full rest day which we probably didn’t need.

As well as cycle touring bikes, we used panniers because they are easy and quick to pack. We kept our gear compact by putting Ortleib front panniers on our Old Man Mountain rear racks with an Ortleib front bag on the handlebars and two Salsa 3 litre bags on the front forks. The Salsa panniers didn’t get in our way with the small amounts of pushing required on forestry roads.

Our Durston Mid Pro Solid tent lived on Chris’s rear rack and a small amount of food on mine. You don’t need to carry much food or water in Hokkaido. There’s a constant supply of ‘conbinis’ (convenience stores) with all the food you could need and then some more. And food is cheap – $5 NZD equivalent for sushi that would cost $15 NZD at home. Also, like in Taiwan, conbinis have preprepared meals they will heat in a rapid microwave so you don’t have to cook if you don’t want to. We took our Kovea Spider cooker with its adaptor for tennis ball gas canisters and mixed cooking for ourselves with pre-prepared food and eating out in the larger towns (smaller towns didn’t have readily apparent restaurants).

Unlike Taiwan, there’s rarely seating in Japanese conbinis where you can eat your food. We found ourselves looking like homeless people sitting on the concrete step outside so we could throw our packaging into the conbini’s bins after eating. Throwing away rubbish is by far the biggest challenge of cycle touring in Japan because the country doesn’t believe in public rubbish bins. People are supposed to take their rubbish home and dispose of it there – that’s fine if you have a home! Not to mention, Japanese food comes with ridiculous amounts of packaging. To access a camembert cheese round first you pull the plastic container out of a cardboard box. Then you pull the soft plastic top off the base. Next you take the plastic wrapping off the cheese round. Then you undo the foil paper wrapping around each segment of cheese!

As well as conbinis providing handy places for resupply, Hokkaido had a plethora of ‘Michi no ekis’. These are government-provided roadside rest stops. They sell food from the local area and often have an associated café as well as toilets, comfortable places to sit, and plugs where you can charge devices.

Hokkaido has lots of excellent infrastructure for cycle touring, including many campgrounds. About half the campgrounds we stayed at were free; paid campgrounds were around $5 NZD per person. For that price you got somewhere to throw rubbish! All campgrounds have mown grass for tents, toilet blocks, covered cooking and washing-up areas. They don’t usually have showers because the Japanese norm is to go to onsens to shower and bathe. Many campgrounds were near onsens, where we paid around $5 NZD to sit in very hot water (42 degrees Celsius) for as long as we could stand it. I felt like my head was exploding after twenty minutes, but they were great places to freshen up after a day of riding.

A surprising aspect of Hokkaido was the lack of beauty in the buildings. Ignorantly, I’d been expecting lovely old temples. However, I learned Hokkaido was only settled by Yamato Japanese from the 1700s, with mass assimilation of the local Ainu people from the 1800s. The subsistence-living Ainu also occupied parts of southeastern Russia, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Today, there are no Ainu speakers remaining as a result of Ainu being prevented from speaking their language or practising their religion. Ainu were only legally recognised as an indigenous people of Japan in 2019.

Another reason for a lack of old buildings in Hokkaido is a general attitude of impermanence for Japanese housing. This isn’t a surprise in a country with regular massive earthquakes and tsunamis. We talked with Ash, a British snowboarder who bought and is running a farm park on Hokkaido (one of his twelve cats took a liking to Chris’s pannier but we had to leave her behind). Ash told us most Japanese houses are only built to last 30 years; therefore houses depreciate in value through their lives. Quite the contrast to New Zealand housing.

Observing the many falling down houses across Hokkaido, we saw very light wooden framing, lightweight vinyl-coated metal cladding, and asphalt tiles on building paper for roofing. Combine those materials with strong earthquakes and many metres of snow each year, together with a declining population abandoning houses in rural areas, it makes sense that many houses are literally collapsing into the ground. The declining population is also leading to lack of general maintenance – pavements in many areas were cracked with weeds growing through. Roads were fraying at their edges and the tarmac slumped under the weight of vehicles.

Contrasting with buildings, landscapes in Hokkaido are beautiful and varied. Our favourite location was Rishiri Island, in the far northwest. Rishiri is topped by a perfectly shaped 1721m volcano which you see for hundreds of kilometres while cycling up the rugged western coast, the first leg of our tour.

We got a pleasant surprise along this coast – where the MapOut app suggested we’d climb a lot of vertical there were actually tunnels. The longest was nearly five kilometres; in one stretch we were in tunnels for 7km of a total 7.5km travelled. In one day we cycled 24km of tunnels in 93km total riding. Other cyclists found the tunnels stressful but, for the most part, we found them fine as Japanese drivers are very polite and give you a wide berth when they pass.

After visiting Rishiri and Rebun Islands in the northwest, we cycled around the northernmost point in Japan then down the sandy beaches and marshy rivers of the eastern coast to Shiretoko Peninsula, the wildest area of Hokkaido.

Shiretoko supposedly has one of the highest densities of bears in the world but, sadly, we saw none. Or, as a number of friends pointed out to us, perhaps not so sadly as media have publicised an ex-kiwi being amongst the 108 people attacked by bears so far in 2025, 7 of whom have died. It’s a very bad bear year – normally 1 person dies each year in a bear attack in Japan. The theory is that low yields of beech nuts are driving bears into habited areas in search of food. Like New Zealand beech trees, Japanese beech have mast years – producing huge quantities of seed every few years.

Japanese people certainly are scared of bears – there were a lot of signs and scary depictions of them. However, Japan just shuts places down rather than adopting bear-safe practices like in North America where secure bins for food and rubbish are the norm in camping areas (of course you can put your food in the toilets!). Shutdowns proved something of a problem in autumn – camping areas were unexpectedly closed when we arrived. On the west coast, a campground was shut because a single bear scat had been found two weeks prior.

From the east coast we cycled back to Chitose, Hokkaido’s airport near Sapporo which is the largest city on the island. Cycling through the mountains in the Hidakasanmyaku-Erimo quasi-National Park as autumn colours developed was a different sort of beauty from the coastlines. Quasi-national parks are not false parks but parks managed by local rather than central government. Hokkaido has five quasi-National Parks of which we cycled through four including the Niseko-Shakotan-Otaru volcanic landscapes on the southwest coast, marshes of Abashiri at the bottom of the northeast coast and the volcanic peninsula and wetlands of Akkeshi-Kiritappu in the southeast. Hokkaido also has six government-governed national parks of which we visited four – Rishiri Rebun in the northwest, Shiretoko in the east, Shikotsu Toya near Sapporo and Kushiroshitsukogen in the south-east where red-crested cranes hang out.

No report on Japan is complete without a mention of Japanese toilets. Two days out from Sapporo, we camped in a disused toilet on Nissho Pass at 1100m (the highest point in our riding). The disused toilet was as clean as operational toilets. It also had a door to keep out the strong winds and any scavenging bears. However, operational toilets are more interesting than disused ones because Japan is the kingdom of active toilets. They have heated seats and heated water to spray your anatomy. Some have a drying function as well. Toilet blocks are beautifully warm thanks to heated toilet seats. I’d hazard a guess many cycle tourists have hung out in toilet blocks on chilly nights because there’s always a large disabled toilet with room for a carry mat or two.

We spent a day checking out Sapporo, which has excellent cafes and restaurants. A very gracious gallery owner allowed us a happy hour perusing the paintings and prints jammed into their lovely art gallery. Then we packed our bicycles and flew home to New Zealand via Tokyo, with keen intent to return and check out some of the many other Japanese islands in the future.