The trip and the Ice Festival

The Trip

Travel, travel and more travel.

I arranged my trip to the Snow Festival through IACE Travel, a travel agency with offices on most of the military bases in Japan. My package was $2,000 and included the flight, hotel, breakfasts, transportation and dinner at the Sapporo Bier Garten. All in all, I think it was a fair price. Could you book this trip yourself? Sure. But, there's a lot of moving parts (such as arranging transportation to and from each airport) and it gets tedious. My personal opinion is that I prefer to pay a set price and not have to worry about each indvidual part of the trip.

We started at 7am on Wednesday in Yokosuka and took a bus to the Haneda airport in Tokyo (about 1 hour away). We then boarded a plane to Chitose Airport in Sapporo. The flight took about 90 minutes. From there we boarded another bus that took us to the Lake Shikotsu Ice Festival (more about that later) and that took about 45 minutes. From there we went to our hotel in Sapporo and close to the Snow Festival (another 1 hour drive). So as you can tell, we spent a lot of time driving around and being transported to the Snow Festival location.

If you are planning to go on this trip, I strongly suggest dressing in layers. The bus, the airports, the planes are all uncomfortably hot and typically have no way for you to control the climate at your indvidual seat. I always layer up with a tank top, a hoodie, and another jacket.

Lake Shikotsu Ice Festival

The first stop we made was the Lake Shikotsu Ice Festival. This is completely different than the Snow Festival and is about an hour away. The setting is right in front of the second largest and deepest lake in Japan. It was absolutely picturesque and beautiful.

The Ice Festival has many things made of ice, like ice caves, ice slides and sculptures. If you're heading up to Sapporo for the Snow Festival, it is well worth it to make the trip to the Ice Festival as well.

The beautiful surroundings of the Ice Festival

One of the ice things.

This was a real working waterfall with an ice mountain.

This was a cave made using ice and the boughs of evergreen trees. It was very green and very beautiful.

Fish frozen in ice was a big thing at both the snow festival and here.

From the top of the Ice Festival

Riding the ice slides.

Yen on the walls of one of the caves for luck.

John tries the ice slide.

A shrine made of ice.

There were horses.

....to be continued...