We took the street car to Yunokawa-Onsen station where we walked about 15 minutes to the Hakodate botanical gardens where the snow monkeys live! The walk from the tram stop was along the river and was actually really lovely, even in the deep snow and cold.

The entrance ticket to the botanical garden was 300 Yen or about $3. The monkeys were outdoors right by the entrance. There wasn’t much snow, but the monkeys looked happy in their warm natural hot spring. It was cute how the monkeys all got into the bath backwards like they were delicately trying to ease themselves into the hot water, just like humans do.

There were monkeys cleaning one another, it was really worth the visit to see them! There was a foot bath nearby for humans too, so you can sort of bath with the snow monkeys… sort of. We had to rush back to the tram to get our train, so we sadly had to skip the foot bath this time. Next we wandered around the green house and saw some plants. There was a little canopy walk inside the greenhouse, a lot like the botanical gardens in Amsterdam. 

Afterwards we jumped back on the tram (some of the trams are old and have the traditional wooden floors which I love) and headed to the eki (trainstation) to grab our bags. We took the train to Shin-Hakodate before jumping on the JR Hokuto train to Sapporo.