The Summer Tour of Hokkaido 2027

The journey begins weeks before you fly. Your Tour Directors meet you on a private video call to introduce themselves, take you through the twelve days and hear what you are most looking forward to. A digital welcome pack follows, with packing guidance for the season, your arrival instructions and reading for the flight. When you walk out of arrivals at New Chitose, you are already known and already expected.

A private chauffeur meets you at New Chitose and drives you north to Shirogane, where Mori no Ryotei Biei stands among spruce and fir, seventeen rooms in low wooden buildings joined by covered corridors, each with a private open-air onsen and the forest at the window. The welcome kaiseki is served that evening with the forest in the windows. The next day is given to the lavender of Furano and the rolling road through Kamifurano, and on the third morning you walk the flower slopes of Shikisai-no-Oka and stand beside the Blue Pond, its pale larch trunks rising from milky turquoise water.

On the way south, a tasting at the Otokoyama sake brewery in Asahikawa, its water drawn from the Daisetsu mountains. Then two nights at Ao no Za, in a suite with its own open-air onsen. The second day is a full day of relaxation, with nothing planned but the lakeshore, the onsen and two evenings of kaiseki.

The morning is spent at Upopoy, the national museum of the Ainu, with a private guide. In Noboribetsu, Takinoya draws four kinds of spring water for its onsen, your room has its own onsen, and both dinners are kaiseki in a private dining room. You walk up to Jigokudani, the steaming valley above the town, and the next morning sit with your feet in the warm river that runs down from the crater lake of Oyunuma. The afternoon is yours, for the springs.

The Usuzan ropeway lifts you to the summit of Mount Usu, with the caldera, Mount Yotei and the Pacific laid out below. At The Lake Suite Konosumika dinner is kaiseki beside the lake, and afterwards the fireworks open over the water.

The road north pauses for coffee in the wooded ravine of Jozankei. In Otaru you walk the rooms of a herring baron's villa and the stone warehouses of the canal, before two nights at Kuramure, where each of the nineteen rooms is named for a writer, poet or artist of Otaru and keeps its own semi-open-air onsen. The day between is spent on the Shakotan coast: Cape Kamui, the sea urchin counter, and a tasting at the Nikka distillery in Yoichi, where Masataka Taketsuru brought the craft of Scotch whisky home to Japan.

In Sapporo the Sapporo Grand Hotel stands a few minutes on foot from the flowers and fountains of Odori Park. The evening light is spent on the summit of Mount Moiwa as the city comes alight below. The last day takes in Hokkaido Jingu beneath the old trees of Maruyama, and Moerenuma Park, a whole landscape shaped as one sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, with its summer fountain. Lunch is jingisukan, lamb grilled at your table with cold Sapporo beer in the red-brick Kaitakushi-kan, on the ground where the city's brewing began, and the farewell dinner is at the tempura counter. On the last morning a private chauffeur takes you to New Chitose.