I got a surprise today while walking in the underground arcade north out of Kyoto Station, when I noticed on the wall some photographs that I took eight years ago.

I did the photography for Alice's article as a fun project, as described in two blog posts at the time, "Japanese Candles" and "Japanese Candles, Followup".

The article is still on the Japan Times web site, here, and originally looked like this:

The two candle photos bookmarking this post are the originals for those used in the article.

I was in the area to renew my driver's license, which went [...]

I'm coming out of blogging hibernation to write about a bicycle ride I did yesterday. I'm pretty happy with myself for it, so in keeping with using my blog as a diary, I'm putting the story here.

There aren't many photos, both because I had only my cellphone and wasn't stopping a lot, and because the stupid iOS app I was using (Halide) decided to not actually save all but one of the photos that I took in the first eight hours. )-:

So, having seen friend Vincent's ride to Ise City last month, I thought I'd give it a [...]

I made a few outings to photograph the fall colors in and around Kyoto this year. On the way to our first main destination, we made an impromptu stop at this little-known, out-of-the-way Kotokuji Temple. It turns out that the maple have only just started to turn, but it's still a quiet, lovely place to visit.

I'd discovered this temple a couple of years ago while on a bike ride to explore the general area, a couple of hours away by bicycle from my home in Kyoto. The 1km-long driveway to the temple is notable for its steepness; the average [...]

Considering that my last blog post was more than five months ago, I guess it's safe to say that for the most part I'm taking a break from blogging. But having recently came across photos from a last-year outing to temples in Shiga, Japan, I thought I'd post a few.

I haven't done a whole lot of riding since last fall, and in particular over the last month or so have been beset on and off by a persistent throat infection, so I probably bit off more than I could chew with a 300km ride with Gorm, but while he's in town I want to take the opportunity for such epic adventures.

The ostensible goal of the ride was to visit a mountain area of Gifu Prefecture known as "Machu Picchu of Gifu", due to a view of it that calls to mind the famous Machu Picchu of Peru.

(I [...]