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hokkaido honeymoon

rose and i decided to do a few weeks of icon representing the epistemic certainty of the linked pagebikepacking in hokkaido as our honeymoon. we decided to explore the south west of hokkaido just outside sapporo in northern japan. our overall trip is loosely organized after the shakotan and niseko hills route from the amazing site http://hokkaidowilds.org/. we made a handful of changes to go slower and add some detours from the original route. you can explore all our rough route plans here, which is just about 360 miles. we’ll be doing this over the course of 3 weeks with multiple breaks at hotels to break up stretches of camping.

flying with bicycles

this was our first time boxing our bicycles for travel and i will say it was a little bit of a pain, just in transit in the air port and having to reassemble things once we were here. thankfully nothing was damaged in transit except one hub axel/bearing got a bit out of place which took a little work to push back. for some reason our bicycles had to be rechecked and re-inspected when transferring at tokyo/narita to go to sapporo. after that, we were told we couldn’t reassemble the bicycle in the airport and needed to do it outside. lastly one airport worker said we could just leave our boxes by this trash can but people definitely were giving me some weird looks.

we wished we had reinforced the corners of the boxes slightly more as one handle on roses box did break. thankfully she had nothing that would’ve been able to fall through the broken part.

we used a single 15m cone wrench for a light weight pedal wrench and it worked well enough for putting them back on, we struggled at first to find the lightest option.

when flying, you still need all your bags contained. we opted for putting lots of things in the bicycle box, like my tent, some tools, etc, and everything else in an ultralite duffel.

gear list

rose showed me https://lighterpack.com and i found it very useful for figuring out what was maybe too heavy. somehow everytime i saved some weight i found something else to take it’s place… but things are much more compact and i have more vanity/luxury items than i expected, like a synth, chair, full sized towel, and some games. weighing out each thing and figuring out ways of shaving off grams was actually quite addicting and i see why ultralite people get into it. i think from downsizing things and cutting things in half and opting for ultralite versions of things, i shaved off at 3 lbs and also a considerable amount of bulk.

bears!

after reading about the Hokkaido bears, rose and i decided early we’d get bear spray. we found it hard to research where would reliably have bear spray. nothing online suggested that DCM, a large and common household and home improvement store, would have them. knowing this would’ve probably simplified our worries that we wouldn’t be able to find some before leaving on our first leg. many sites online suggested montbell, but the closest one was a bit out of the way in tomakomai. we also found bear spray for sale near lake shikotsu at cafe hoo hoo, a cute and delicious restaurant featuring a resident hawk named Mickey.

secondly, we saw a LOT of signs on the way to lake shikotsu but we didn’t see many thereafter. we also checked a website/app called kuma map that shows recent bear sightings and encounters across Japan. we rarely saw folks using bear bells except a few fisherman around lake shikotsu.

bikepacking list

frame mounted:

front left pannier:

front right pannier:

frame bag:

rear right pannier (backpack):

rear left pannier (blue):

last updated:

2026.07.13