Silver Week Tour 2026 – overall impressions

Posted on by micha Comment

Silver Week this year was as good as it gets with all 3 public holidays being in the working week from Monday to Wednesday. So with only 2 days of personal holidays, I could get 9 days in a row off work. I figured that this was enough to let me explore a bit further away from Tokyo, so I aimed for Aomori, the northern part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. On top of that I snuck out of work a little bit early on Friday afternoon to get a little head-start by heading up to Nikko for the first night, to avoid the mad holiday traffic out of Tokyo on the Saturday morning.

Given it was a week with a lot of public holidays I pre-planned a lot of the route and pre-booked my hotels. I almost never do this, but it can be a bit difficult to find accommodation in Japan during these holiday weeks. While I have no idea how easy or difficult it would have been to find accommodation while enroute, I must say that in retrospect I very much dislike being this locked in to a travel plan. It caused some rushing and long days and locked me into certain areas despite the weather not always playing along.

Speaking of weather, this year has been pretty miserable in Japan overall. On this trip in particular I had rainy, or at least heavily clouded-over weather for more than half the trip, with most of the really impressive roads and views being spoiled by the weather. That’s not to say I didn’t have any nice days or good stretches in between, I most certainly did! But overall it certainly could have been a little bit better and the poor weather certainly contributed to me missing out on some of my planned sights and stops.

The bike performed well and without a hitch. I covered over 3,700km, mostly along country roads, and overall very much enjoyed the tour. I did get a bit wet from time to time as the adventure suit I have with its internal rainproof layer doesn’t really work well for extended riding in the rain. I really do need to get an external oversuit. Also my helmet intercom appears to have died on the last day, so I had no music on the long stretch back to Tokyo, but otherwise everything worked well. I especially liked my new phone holder which has moved the GPS above the dash and is now in a much better position.

Overall I think I needed a couple of extra days for this trip. Alternatively I should have pushed a bit harder to get up north to then spend more time in Aomori, instead of concentrating on the roads up and down. I probably also should have spent more time researching places to stop at. While I stopped at some absolutely exceptional places they were mostly accidental and not pre-planned stops, whereas some of my preplanned stops turned out to be less spectacular. I also had to skip some of my planned stops due to running out of time on certain days. With a bit more time I could have visited all the places I wanted to go to or spend more time enjoying the places I did stop off at. In particular it would have been nice to “stop and smell the flowers” at a few places, such as the matsuri at the Jomon stone circle.

Some of my personal highlights of the tour included:

  • The “L-shaped” farmhouses
  • The whale museum in Sendai
  • Lakes Tozawa and Towada in Aomori
  • The road up to Cape Tappi
  • The Hirosaki Capsule Inn
  • Climbing Mt Iwaki
  • Osorezan temple
  • Akkado and Ryusendo caves
  • The tsunami-affected coastal road north of Fukushima

Photo Albums

Trip Statistics:

  • Motorbike:
    • Total distance: 3711km
    • Petrol:
      • Fuel-ups: 9
      • Litres: 190.14
      • Cost: 31,460¥
  • Accommodation:
    • Mixture of dorms, BnB’s (without the breakfast), and hotels, some with meals.
    • Cost: 65,026¥
  • Meals:
    • Mixture of konbini-snacks, restaurants, and hotel-provided meals.
    • Cost: ?

Individual days:


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