Hoi Hokkaido pt5: Furano Flower Valley

For our last few days in beautiful Hokkaido we headed for Furano. This is maybe the most touristy area of Hokkaido, especially in July, because AAAALL the flowerfields are in full bloom!

In the back you can see the mountainrange that we actually climbed in the last post, but now from the other side!

SO GOOD and I miss it already :( After this amazing lunch, we went for another very popular sight in Furano, which is the “Blue Pond”.

The fascinating story behind this pond is that it is artificial made to stop mudflows from the mountains, but started to color a deep turquois color because of the minerals and algae. It is a very mysterious place!

ofcourse lots of insectlife, which I find fascinating :)

We headed to our (favorite?) cottage for the holidays:

A beautiful mini-cottage in the middle of nowhere with a view over the mountains, and the interior was full of Scandinavian design furniture XD

We had such a great time there, it was so beautiful. The owner though warned us to not go hiking in the morning because the bear family living nearby… But we did have two wonderful days in this area, with tons of flowers and good food.

We went for a supernice little hand-made soba shop and the mushroom soba was so good:

And we went to the “garden of the winds” , a cosy cottage-core flowergarden that was the set of a Japanese drama :)

It was just so beautiful. All the flowers were in bloom and there were tons of different butterflies.

This map below shows all the flowers that grow at the Garden of the Wind.

But, there were also tons and tons of Japanese hornets XD And you don’t want those around you. One even landed in Wards hair! Two stings by those monsters and you’re basically dead. They are humongous and you can hear them coming with their loud buzzing sound. There were so many of them there it was crazy. This is what they look like (not my hand! XD ) :

And so we went to nearby Ningle Terrace, which is a small “village” of wooden cabins in the forest that each house a different local artist. It was really to stroll around. At night they light it up with lanterns, so it is really cosy.

After our flower/hornet trip we decided to go to a hot spring! Near the mountains we found an incredible hotspring with multiple baths and areas, and stayed there for quite a while. Ofcourse no photos, but this was the view :D

After his refreshing stop, we went over to the big lavender fields. The next day we would have to get up early to catch our plane to Tokyo, so this was our last evening in this flower paradise!