Hokkaido, Japan's Wild North

Hokkaido is where Japan loosens its collar. The island is roughly the size of Austria with far fewer people, so distances stretch and the landscape gets the last word: volcanic lakes, birch forest, dairy pasture and a coastline that freezes solid. In Sapporo, February means the block-long ice sculptures of the Snow Festival in Odori Park and a bowl of miso ramen with butter and sweetcorn eaten shoulder to shoulder in a Susukino alley. An hour away, Otaru's gaslit canal and stone warehouses are what remains of the herring boom that built the island's first fortunes.

Summer rewrites the place. In Furano and Biei the hills turn into stripes of lavender, potato flower and wheat, with the Blue Pond glowing an improbable cobalt among dead larches. Further east lies Shiretoko, a UNESCO peninsula of brown bears, waterfalls that fall straight into the sea and salmon rivers you can hear before you see. Kushiro's marsh keeps the red-crowned cranes that dance in the snow, and the caldera lakes of Akan and Mashu hold water so clear it barely registers as liquid.

Winter is the headline act: dry Siberian powder buries Niseko and Rusutsu, and on the Okhotsk coast at Abashiri icebreakers shoulder through drift ice that floated down from the Amur River. Between it all, eat. Sea urchin and scallops at Hakodate's morning market, hairy crab from Rausu, salmon roe piled until the rice disappears, Sapporo soup curry, jingisukan lamb grilled over a domed iron plate, and dairy good enough to justify a soft-serve queue in February. Bathe afterwards in the sulphur of Noboribetsu or the lakeside pools of Toya. If your picture of Japan is temples and neon, the north will happily redraw it.