We were up and away fairly early the next day as our train to Hacidache was leaving at 9.15 a.m. We needed to get 3 trains the first one we were only on for 35 minutes as this was another bullet train. We then got another train to Hachinoe and then an onward train to Sapporo. The first train was fine but the second one went for around 15 minutes then stopped for about an hour and 15 minutes!!! We didn’t have a clue what was wrong as all of the announcements were in Japanese and there wasn’t a guard to be seen anywhere! We figured it may have stopped due to the line being cleared of snow as the snow was really deep and it was snowing fairly heavily. Eventually we got going and this was our only major hiccup, it did mean that we had missed our connecting train, which wasn’t a problem as we just went to the ticket office and reserved some more tickets on a different train. At the end of the day it was a miracle that anything was running as the snow was incredible deep, some of the snow piles at the

side of the tracks must have been around 10 foot high. It did look really pretty everywhere though.

We finally pulled into Sapporo about 2 hours late, we needed to get to our hostel pretty sharpish as check-in closed at 8 and we got off the train 7.20! We also needed to get a metro about 3 stops and then find our way to the hostel whilst battling through really deep snow. We were pushing it but made it with about 5 minutes to spare and the really warm welcome we received from the hostel owners made up for the long journey and extreme cold. The hostel was great and toasty warm and we instantly felt at home so it was a great end to a very long travelling day!

---