Obihiro to Cape Erimo, the road they paved with gold

The road between Hiroo and Shoya is called the Golden Road because of what it cost. Not what it earns, and not what it looks like at sunrise: in 1934, when the coastal route between Hidaka and Tokachi finally opened after seven years of construction, the bill was so far beyond anything the territory had seen that people said you could have paved the thing with gold for the same money. The name stuck to a thirty-three kilometre stretch of cliff that the sea has been trying to take back ever since.

What the name does not tell you is how much of it you now drive indoors.

§ 01

Two thirds of the Golden Road has a roof on it

Counted along the measured centreline, the Golden Road carries twenty-three structures: eight tunnels totalling 12.87 km and fifteen avalanche protectors — concrete galleries open on the seaward side — totalling 4.84 km. That is 17.71 km of covered road.

What proportion that is depends entirely on where you decide the road begins, so here are three honest answers. Between the Hiroo town node and Shoya, 37.2 km apart on this sheet, it is 47.6 per cent. Between the first structure and the last, a span of 26.1 km, it is 67.8 per cent. And across the densest 16.1 km, where eight tunnels sit nose to tail with five galleries between them, it is 85.1 per cent. On that middle stretch, roughly one kilometre in seven has sky above it.

For comparison, the Ororon Line on the Sapporo to Rumoi sheet runs 19.0 per cent covered overall and 40.3 per cent through its worst cliffs. The Golden Road is a different order of thing. It is the most heavily roofed road on this site by a wide margin, and across the whole 222 km corridor the figure still comes to 9.4 per cent — 33 structures, 20.96 km — because almost all of it is concentrated in one place.

§ 02

The measurements check out against the builder’s own

Three of these tunnels have published lengths, which makes them a test of whether any of this counting means anything. The Erimo Golden Tunnel, the longest road tunnel in Hokkaido, is 4,941 m by the development bureau’s figure and 4,943 m measured from map geometry. The Shin-Takarahama tunnel is 2,438 m official, 2,436 m measured. The Meguro tunnel is 1,876 m official, 1,878 m measured.

Two metres out on each, in both directions, over structures two to five kilometres long. That is the agreement you would expect between a surveyed centreline and a drawn one, and it is the reason the other figures on this page are quoted at all.

§ 03

Why it cost that much

The first attempt was in 1798. Kondo Juzo, returning from a government survey of the eastern territory, was pinned down at Hiroo by a storm because the only way through was a trading path that scrambled across cliff and reef. With help from local Ainu he had about twelve kilometres of mountain path cut — the first road construction in Ezo, as the record has it.

After that the surveys kept concluding the same thing: neither the coast nor the mountains could be built economically. Work finally began in 1927 — tunnelling, filling in sections of shoreline, cutting the cliff back — and took seven years. The road that opened in 1934 was called the Nissho Coast Road, from the characters for Hidaka and Tokachi.

That name is worth sitting with, because the mountain crossing between the same two provinces carries it too. Nissho Pass, on the Sapporo to Obihiro sheet, is the inland answer to the same problem. Hidaka and Tokachi are separated by a mountain range that reaches the sea, and there are exactly two ways round it: over the top, or along the bottom. One of them was named after the other’s difficulty. Both are still expensive to keep open.

§ 04

It is still being built

The thing to understand about the Golden Road is that it is not a historical artefact. The disaster-prevention programme covering the Erimo–Hiroo section was commissioned in 1990 and the big structures are recent: the Erimo Golden Tunnel opened in February 2011, the Meguro tunnel in January 2012, the Shin-Takarahama tunnel in February 2016.

A driver who last came this way in 2010 has not driven the road that exists now. Nine kilometres of what is currently the quietest, straightest, least alarming part of the route did not exist then; the traffic was still out on the cliff edge where the rocks come down. This matters for anything you read about the Golden Road that is more than about a decade old, including the parts that describe it as frightening.

§ 05

What actually closes this road

The reason for all that concrete is on the record. In September 2003 the Tokachi-oki earthquake brought rock down inside the section. In January 2004 a slope failed in Erimo town and moved 42,000 cubic metres of material. Beyond the named events, the administrator’s own description is routine: avalanche and wave action close this road from time to time.

Waves are the part visitors do not plan for. This is not a road set back behind a harbour wall — for kilometres at a time the carriageway is the lowest built thing on a cliff face with deep water at the foot of it, and a winter low in the Pacific can shut it in calm cold weather, with no snow involved at all.

This completes a set worth stating plainly, because the three sheets answer the same question three different ways. The Shiretoko crossing closes on a published schedule you can read months ahead. Karikachi has no gate at all. The Golden Road has no schedule and no gate: it closes when the sea decides, which can be any day of the year, and it reopens when the sea stops. If a trip can only absorb one surprise, it should not be this road that provides it.

§ 06

The cape costs fifty kilometres

Here is the decision this sheet exists to put a number on. Obihiro to Shizunai, driven for arrival, is 169.6 km and about two hours fifty. Obihiro to Shizunai by way of Cape Erimo is 222.1 km and about three and a half hours. The fastest route does not merely skip the cape; at its closest it stays 40.3 km away from it.

So the cape is a deliberate 52.5 km and forty minutes. It is also, unusually for this site, the whole point of the corridor rather than a detour from it — the cape road loops twenty-six kilometres around the tip of the peninsula, and the Golden Road is on the way there whichever direction you come from. The honest framing is that the fast road is not a version of this drive. It is a different journey that happens to share its ends.

§ 07

The wind is the climate here

The weather station at the cape gives a mean annual wind speed of 8.1 m/s. That is a thirty-year average of every hour of every month — about 29 km/h, sustained, as the ordinary condition. Sapporo’s equivalent figure is 3.6 m/s.

It is seasonal, but not in the direction that helps. December averages 10.8 m/s, January 9.9, November 9.8. The calmest month of the year is July at 6.4 m/s, which is still well above Sapporo’s windiest. Two practical consequences follow. A car door at the cape car park needs holding, and a roof box or a bike on the back changes how the car behaves on the exposed sections in a way it does not on the rest of the island.

§ 08

Summer is the least sunny season

The same station records 1,926.2 hours of sunshine a year, which is more than Sapporo’s 1,718.0. But the monthly distribution is inverted compared with almost anywhere a visitor will have been. July gets 123.0 hours and August 127.8. March gets 208.1.

That is sea fog, and it is a measurement rather than an impression: the cape is foggiest exactly when the summer holidays are. Anyone driving out to the southernmost point of this coast in July for the view should know that the odds are materially worse then than in May or October. The fog is also the argument for allowing more than the engine’s forty minutes for the cape loop, because the road is slow when you cannot see the sea you came for.

§ 09

The first eighty kilometres are the easy part

Almost everything written about this corridor is about its last third, which gives a misleading impression of the day. Obihiro to the cape is 127.8 km and about an hour thirty-seven, and the early part of that runs on Route 236 and the expressway alongside it, across the Tokachi plain, at a speed the cliff section never offers. The Golden Road’s first structure does not appear until about 84 km in.

The return half is different again. From the cape to Shizunai is 94.3 km but about an hour fifty-five — further in time than the longer first half, because it is coastal road through a string of towns rather than plain and expressway. There is a second, smaller cliff section on this side, around seventeen kilometres of it running 19.1 per cent covered, which is almost exactly the Ororon Line’s overall figure and reads as unremarkable only because of what came before.

Fuel is the one piece of ordinary planning worth doing. The stations are in the towns — Hiroo at the north end, Erimo town about fourteen kilometres beyond the cape — and not on the cliff between them. Filling up in Hiroo before starting the Golden Road costs nothing and removes the only genuinely awkward variable from the middle of the day.

§ 10

Where this sheet joins the others

Obihiro is the hinge. This sheet starts where Sapporo to Obihiro finishes, so the two make a continuous run from the island’s main city to its southern cape, over Nissho Pass and then down the coast that borrowed the pass’s name. Furano to Kushiro also passes through Obihiro, from the north-west, over Karikachi.

At the far end, Shizunai sits on the road up to Sapporo, which closes the loop. For the gradients, surfaces, winter dates and the four o’clock problem that apply to all of this, what the roads are actually like is the place to start. Every distance quoted here can be checked against the full table on the driving distances page.

§ 11

The car, and when to go

Nothing about this corridor demands a particular vehicle in summer. What it rewards is a car you are comfortable in at speed with a crosswind, which argues against the smallest class and against loading the roof. If the trip starts at the airport, the transfer and counter time come before the first kilometre and a day planned from the table alone will already be behind.

On timing, I would take late September or October over midsummer for this one specifically, and the sunshine figures are why: the fog thins, the wind has not yet reached its December average, and the cape is the only reason to be here. Winter is a genuine question rather than a romantic one. The road is ploughed and the tunnels have removed most of the old hazard, but the thing that closes it is weather in the Pacific, and that is not a condition you can plan around from a hotel in Sapporo.