Drove around Hokkaido back in December 2015 – beautiful place, precious family time – a very cold cool experience in short. The following is a special video I made and some personal travel tips at Hokkaido during winter. Many thanks to Bumblebee Mum who made tons of FREE Hokkaido travel guide and this video by DL Production.

The Driving Experience at Hokkaido

Some Useful Tips

1. Plan your trip early, seriously – especially if you wish to stay in one of those popular ski resorts. We skipped Tomamu and Niseko because of hotel availability.
2. It’s a little risky, but do-able. Most folks at Trip Advisor are strongly against winter driving at Hokkaido; and I agree. If you don’t enjoy driving (or have no confidence in your driving skill), don’t do this. Stick with the trains and buses – it’s Japan anyway, they have the most-developed public transport system in the world.  That said, however, if you are feeling adventurous, why not? This was my first winter driving trip and it turned out alright (with a few lucky escapes though).
3. Must have – winter gloves, car snow shovel (mine was provided by the car rent company), winter boot, polarise sun glasses, a piece of cloth to wipe off condensed water on your mirror, and hours of good music supply.
4. Keyword – SLOW. To stay safe, drive slowly, turn slowly. Accelerate slowly. Brake slowly.
5. Your car will skid, no matter how careful or slow you drive. It’s just something you can’t avoid when driving in Hokkaido during winter (especially on frozen roads in the city). So be prepared and understand the concept of counter-steering.

That’s all I can think of right now – will update this post again.

This is part of a bigger post, check out Bucket List 2015 for all my self-assigned challenges.

Started this challenge on April 10th. Signed up and attended my first oil painting class (something totally new to me). I’ll be painting in oil every Thursday for the next 5 months. Will add in more photos of my doodles and art work as log in later stage.

Update April 24th

It’s harder than I thought. Half of the time I just don’t have the mood to settle down and spend time on the paper. This challenge is going to take more than 30 days to complete.

This is part of a series post that I started early 2015. You can read the other inputs of my bucket list here.

Why do so?

Stronger and healthier body, better basketball game, and for fun.

The plan

I thought setting an end goal wouldn’t be helpful at all. After all experts said the best way to hack (and to sustain) any sort of growth is to focus on the system. So what I did was tweaking my life and changing my habits instead of putting up a “lose X kg of weight” or “grow X kg of muscles” in 30 days.

To do this, I considering my lifestyle thoroughly and set five simple rules/exercise routines  –

• Kettlebell swings – 75/100/125 rep  x 3 times per week
• 90 sec air bench + 60 sec plank – (2+3) x 4 times per week
• Jog/cycle/basketball – 4 times per week
• No calorie drinks (anything with sugar in it) for 30 days
• No white food (noodles, bread, rice) after 18:00

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