Jump ahead:
Day 1 | Train and bus to Towadako via Hachinohe, Towadako Hostel
Day 2 | Towadako boat cruise, walking around lake town
Day 3 | Oirase Gorge
Day 4 | Bus to Shin-Aomori, Train to Hirosaki, Hirosaki Castle & Park sakura, Hirosaki Sakura Hotel
Final Day 5 | Hirosaki to Shin-Aomori, Shin-Aomori to Home
Since I hadn’t done a proper trip to see the Northern Tohoku region yet, I wanted to plan a short trip to see some of the major cities up there. Marie and I had initially looked into doing Towadako, Aomori, and Akita but we quickly realized that we didn’t have enough days to do all that properly. In the end, we left out Akita and focused on Towadako and the rest of Aomori prefecture. This eventually evolved into Towadako – with an emphasis on relaxing by the lake and walking through Oirase Gorge – followed by a famous cherry blossom festival in Hirosaki (hopefully). Akita seemed to be more interesting for outdoor adventures (month of May was still too cold) and we didn’t feel like the actual city of Aomori had enough interesting things to do to keep us there…
General Info on Lake Towada:
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3778.html
Day 1 - Towadako (Lake Towada)
For transportation, we just went to the ticket office at our local train station and bought our Shinkansen tickets through the staff there. We initially planned on buying a one-way ticket to Hachinohe (then bus it to Towadako) and a separate one-way ticket back from Aomori… the staff told us it would be cheaper if we just bought a round-trip ticket to/from Aomori and get off early at Hachinohe instead. Sounded good to us! I didn’t even know that was okay to do… what a nice tip! Since we were doing this trip during Golden Week, we still had to pay for reserved seat prices and specify specific departure times even though we really weren’t able to get reserved seats on the shinkansen (sold out)… yet another reason why I try to avoid travelling during these times. Luckily, we were smarter this time and brought our own solution to the no seat thing hehe. The 0840 shinkansen from Tokyo station got us to Hachinohe around 1126 (¥16110/person).
From Hachinohe to Towadako to Oirase to Shin-Aomori was all done using the JR bus network linked below. They have a nice outline of the bus network in the linked PDF as well. The bus ride from Hachinohe to Towadako was about ¥2670/person, departing at 1320 and then finally arriving at Towadako around 1535.
Access to Lake Towada:
https://www.jrbustohoku.co.jp/en/
https://www.jrbustohoku.co.jp/en/aomori.pdf
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3777.html
For accommodations at Towadako, the options were very limited for 3 nights. The only two we were seriously considering also happened to be at the extreme ends of our price range, one being Towadako Hostel and the other being Hotel Towadaso. In the end we settled for Towadako Hostel since we just couldn’t justify the higher price of Hotel Towadaso in a place like this. I normally shy away from hostels but in the end our choice ended up being good for this trip.
I can’t remember how or why, but just before the trip I was terribly sick. So sick in fact that I still don’t know how I was able to make the trip to Towadako. This really slowed down the pace of our trip and made us take it easy for the first couple days (good thing we didn’t plan to do much). It also meant that I didn’t bother taking any notes on this trip so this post will be completely from my limited itinerary and very poor memory!
Day 2 - Towadako (Lake Towada)
Since I still didn’t have much energy from being sick, we decided to take it easy today and just stay around the lake area. We started out just walking through the main town area and then on to Towada Shrine and the popular Otome no Zo Statue.
There really is not much to this town at all… in fact, a lot of the buildings seemed to be in disrepair and/or abandoned all together. Only in small pockets (closer to the waterfront) was it nice enough to live up to the tourist destination hype.
Here’s some info on the statue:
http://towadako.or.jp/rekishi-densetsu/otomenozou/
After walking around the town for a while, we went on to do the round trip Towadako boat cruise (¥1400/person). We didn’t want to do the one-way cruise and then have to catch the bus back to town, and the circle cruise was more than enough to satisfy us.
Lake Towada Boat Cruise:
http://www.toutetsu.co.jp/ship.html
http://www.toutetsu.co.jp/ship/pamphlet/english.pdf
After the cruise we stopped into some of the nearby visitor centers just to have a peek. Both of them are free to enter but they do close relatively early.
Towada Lake Tourism Information Center:
http://www.city.towada.lg.jp/docs/2014072500014/
Towada Visitor Center:
http://www.env.go.jp/park/towada/guide/towadavc/index.html
We also crossed into Akita prefecture briefly to eat at a small cafe with some great apple pastries… Most of the town resides on the Aomori side of the border but when you cross the little stream you’re actually in Akita! Funny enough, the border extends out into the lake too… how they know where that line is, I’ll never know… I suppose it’s like crossing the equator in the ocean?
Cafe Aka Tonbo:
https://tabelog.com/en/aomori/A0203/A020304/2010222/
For dinner we just walked back towards the bus station area on the main road and picked the restaurant that just looked better. There weren’t many options to begin with so we couldn’t be very picky.
After dinner we just walked back to the hostel, stopping by at the small convenience store to see what they had and to pick up some snacks. There wasn’t much but at least they were still open hehe.
Day 3 - Oirase Gorge
Since I was feeling a little better each day, I felt good enough to walk through most of Oirase Gorge on our third day. Oirase Gorge is one of the “must see” places in the area… I would go so far as to say it’s even more popular than Lake Towada itself. What we ended up doing was catching the JR bus from Towadako to Ishigedo (¥960/person), walked through the gorge, and then caught the bus from Chyoshi-Otaki back to Towadako (¥660/person). We had initially planned on walking from Yakeyama all the way to Nenokuchi, but we didn’t feel it was worth pushing it just to see a little extra (plus we already saw it on the bus ride).
General Info on Oirase Gorge:
http://www.eco-oirase.com/en
https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-city-guides/oirase-gorge
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3775.html
There are restrooms and some food/souvenirs here too, which makes it an ideal starting point for a lot of people:
Dinner this night was right next to where we ate dinner the night before. If I remember correctly, there were only the two restaurants on the main street anyway, plus they were easiest so we just stuck to them. I think the first night was better but we were too hungry to notice much anyway.
After dinner we just walked back up towards the hostel, stopping by a small pop-up apple tent on the side of the road. Our last night at the lake was just spent relaxing and still trying to get better from being sick.
Day 4 - Hirosaki
Today we checked out of our hostel and the owner was nice enough to give us a ride to the bus stop in town. We caught the 0820 JR bus (¥3090) from Towadako to Shin-Aomori station, arriving just after 1100. From Shin-Aomori station, we hopped on the train to Hirosaki station (¥580/person, 1128 to 1200), where we then proceeded to our hotel for the night.
Access from Lake Towada:
https://www.jrbustohoku.co.jp/en/
https://www.jrbustohoku.co.jp/en/aomori.pdf
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3777.html
Hirosaki Sakura Hotel:
http://hirosaki-sakura.com/
Since it was still too early to check in, we dropped our bigger bags off at the hotel and began walking over towards Hirosaki Castle. We stopped along the way at a small restaurant where we had some soba and other local foods for lunch….
Kikufuji:
http://www.kikufuji.co.jp/
It wasn’t too much further to get to Hirosaki Castle. We were catching the very tail end of the sakura festival so we weren’t sure how good the flowers were going to be… I would say we were hopeful but didn’t set our expectations too high.
After visiting the castle grounds, we continued walking around the nearby park where they had another part of the festival going on… here there were more food stands and entertainment going on. They even had one of those old school motorcycle spherical death cage things like in The Place Beyond the Pines.
After what was already a pretty long day, we stopped into the Hirosaki Municipal Tourist Center very briefly just to look around.
Hirosaki City Tourist Hall:
https://www.hirosaki-kanko.or.jp/web/edit.html?id=tourist_hall
I didn’t feel like walking all the way back to the hotel after so we ended up catching one of the buses back towards the hotel. We picked up our bags and checked-in, then went to our room to relax for a bit.
For dinner, we went looking for some ramen across the train tracks. We crossed through the station and ended up getting our Hirosaki style ramen fix at Shinasoba Akiraya. It was a little bit of a walk getting there but the place had good ratings on tabelog.
Final Day 5 - Homeward Bound
The final day of our trip was really just trying to get home in one piece, knowing that everywhere was going to be crowded again (as travelling during Golden Week always is). We checked out of our hotel a little earlier and then managed to catch the 0953 train from Hirosaki, back to Shin-Aomori by 1031 (¥580/person). We took our time at Shin-Aomori station since our shinkansen train wasn’t until 1315. They had some decent food options there with nice gift shops… the apple soft-serve we got was especially good hehe. From Shin-Aomori to Yokohama was a little over 3 more hours of travel (and ¥16110/person) so needless to say, we were glad to be home after this short trip.
