Sapporo, Otaru & Hakodate, 5 Nights

Most flights reach Hokkaido through New Chitose, usually connecting in Tokyo or Osaka, and the van brings you north into Sapporo in about an hour. Sapporo is a young city laid out on a grid, which makes it easy to walk. The evening is for Odori Park, the long green strip at its centre with the TV Tower at one end, and for Sapporo's miso ramen or soup curry, a local dish that suits Indian palates well.

West to Otaru, a herring and trading port whose heyday is still visible in its stone warehouses along the canal, many now restaurants and shops. Sakaimachi street runs up from the water past glass workshops, a large music-box museum and sweet makers selling Hokkaido's famously rich dairy. The seafood market here serves bowls of sea urchin and salmon roe. Return to Sapporo in the afternoon, perhaps via the Shiroi Koibito chocolate factory in the western suburbs.

A loop through Shikotsu-Toya National Park. Lake Shikotsu comes first, one of the clearest and deepest lakes in Japan, lying in a caldera ringed by volcanoes. At Noboribetsu a boardwalk crosses Jigokudani, the Hell Valley, with its sulphur vents and bubbling pools. Lake Toya lies beyond, with Showa-shinzan, a volcano that rose out of farmland during the Second World War, and Mt Usu, reached by ropeway for the view back over the water. The drive back to Sapporo is about two hours.

Check out for the drive south-west to Hakodate, about four hours with a stop. Hakodate was one of the first ports opened to foreign trade in the 1850s, and Motomachi, on the slopes above the harbour, still has the Russian Orthodox church, the old public hall and steep streets running straight to the sea. At dusk take the ropeway up Mt Hakodate for the famous view: the lit city pinched between two bays on a narrow neck of land.

Goryokaku is a star-shaped Western-style fort from the 1860s, where the last holdouts of the shogunate made their stand; see its shape from the tower beside it, then walk the moats, lined with cherry trees that bloom in late April or early May. In the afternoon, drive north to Onuma Quasi-National Park, where small islands linked by footbridges scatter across the lakes below the jagged volcano of Komagatake. Boats and bicycles can be hired by the shore.

Breakfast at the hotel. If time allows before the flight, the morning market beside Hakodate Station is short and lively: crab tanks, dried squid and fresh melon in season. The airport is only about twenty minutes from the centre, and most flights go on to Tokyo for international connections. Alternatively, the bullet train from Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto runs south through the undersea Seikan tunnel to Honshu.