To be one of the estimated two million visitors to the 57th Annual Sapporo Yuki Matsuri (Snow Festival) was very high up on my ‘to do’ list when I arrived in Hokkaido last march. That list was not very long as my knowledge of Hokkaido was very limited at the time; but I am happy to say the festival certainly did not disapoint.
Decided on a pretty rough backpackerish schedule that involved the 7 hour overnight bus both ways on consecutive nights. The bus was actually pretty comfortable as it was custom designed for overnight trips. Less seats, more room and total blackout so sleeping was the only real option. Anyway it gave us plenty of time to check out the main attractions and meet a few people without having to worry about trying to find a hotel room.
The main site is Odori Koen, a 12-block long park in the city centre. Some of the sculptures here were enormous. I can’t remember the exact facts and figures, but some of the bigger ones took more than 4,000 people about a month to make using nearly 3,000 tons of snow. Awesome. My favourite sculpture was the ‘Celebrate Taiwan’ colossus (see pictures) certainly used up a fair bit of memory card on that!
Beautiful in the day, even better at night.
This year they also had sculptures of the International Exhibition Centre and Flinders St Station in Melbourne to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the signing of the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Australia and Japan. Not bad.
Was fairly fresh outside so there was ‘warm rooms’ every block so people could survive the 12 blocks up and back. There was also a small rather hot indoor footbath which was quite nice. These were both generally chockers as there was a fair few people about.
Down in the Susukino bar district they had closed off a street for a few blocks and had smaller but amazingly detailed sculptures of all sorts of things. Camera copped a bit of a belting here as well.
Also managed to get up to the ski jump which was used during the 1972 Winter Olympics. Great view over Sapporo from the top.
Action packed 30 hour excursion (the 16 hours we spent off the bus anyway) and I would definitely recommend having a look if you are ever up this way.
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