Here's a wigglegram of Taiwan-based photographer Valerie Roche near the back entrance to the Eigenji Temple (永源寺) in Shiga Prefecture, from the outing earlier in the month touched on in “A Peek at Not-Yet-Peak Autumn Colors in Japan, To Pique Your Interest”.

If the location seems familiar, it's perhaps because of a wigglegram of Paul Barr in the same place, two years ago, appearing in “The Back Entrance to Shiga’s Eigenji Temple”.

It's such a photogenic temple in autumn, I have to show from that trip for a dozen more postgs, but sadly I got around to only “Rear Courtyard at the Eigenji Temple” and “Anatomy of a Selfie”.

Continued here...

One reason that I don't blog so much these days is that when I do go out with the camera, the places I visit are so overwhelmingly beautiful that I get choice paralysis in deciding what to work on, and what to write about. I start to work on one set of photos, only to get drawn into a hundred side channels for things I want to share, and in the end I share nothing because nothing finds its way all the way to a blog post.

So with the intent to fight agsinst that, I set out this morning to quickly scan the 714 photos I took during a recent outing to some temples in Shiga Prefecture (an hour's drive from Kyoto), and quickly choose a few photos and blog them. What I had hoped would take 30 minutes has, to this point, taken two hours.

Part of the slowness comes from my desire to tie in today's photos with ones from the past. This helps make my blog a diary for my own consumption later in life, I guess, when my memory starts to.... what was I talking about? 🙂

For example, the lead photo above was taken very near where the lead photo of this post was taken, a couple of years prior during that year's same “Shiga temples tour”. But even closer is this photo, take during “Cycling to Nagoya for Coffee”, which was, at 260km, my longest ride to date.

Our first stop of the day, the Eigenji Temple, was not yet at its peak of color, but it was still lovely, and I hope to post much more from the day. When here two years ago, it had indeed been at peak color, as seen in “Anatomy of a Selfie” and a few others. Sigh, that day was so photogenic, there should be 20 more posts just from it. Maybe someday.

We then made our way to the jaw-dropping awe-inspiring emotionally-powerful Kongorinji Temple (金剛輪寺), as introduced a long time ago in “Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple’s Path of Jizou”, but perhaps better photographed half a dozen years ago in “Uncountable Sorrows: Path of Statues Dedicated to Children who Passed Before Their Parents”, or any of the many other posts that the “nearby photos” link under each picture brings you to.

I've felt remarkably uninspired to photograph or write this year, but this was an inspiring trip, so perhaps some of its effects will linger and I'll write more soon. It's five hours after I started writing this post at home, and now I'm finishing it in the Osaka airport as I start a trip to Ohio to visit my folks.

Continued here...

The fall colors starting to descend upon Kyoto has woken me up, at least momentarily, from an almost-two-month blogging slumber. Friends Paul and Olesia are visiting, Paul for the 100th time, Olesia for the first, so we took her up to the Ohara area of Kyoto, in the north-eastern mountains, for the first taste of autumn colors.

Walking up from the parking area toward the temples, the path is lined with tasteful shops. Here's a little kiosk selling only autumn-color handkerchiefs:

On the way in, we stopped by a shop that gave taste samples of their various dressings and ponzu. They were all good, but two of them were “wow!”, so we stopped on the way back to get some.

I also picked up a bottle of aka shiso flavor (red shiso). Really crisp and nice.

We took the long way home to drive through some of the deep mountain roads that I cycle on. When in the forest it was quite dark. In this photo below, it was actually much darker than it seems (I took a longer exposure than normal). Handheld for 1/13th second. It came out okay.

The “warm glow from the setting sun” look is from the car's hazard lights. 🙂

Today's post is a continuation of “SUPER FUN!! Cycling in Supertyphoon Jebi” and its followup, “Surveying Supertyphoon Jebi’s Damage North of Kyoto, Part 1”.

At the end of the previous post, we'd come across a fallen utility pole, as we had a few times earlier....

The photo above is looking back toward where we'd come from, and in it there's a farmer leaning against a truck in front of his house. He'd told me that the road was not passable even by foot, but I'd dismissed it as an exaggeration. I shouldn't have.

What follows are a bunch of photos in chronological order, documenting what we came across....

This section that I had just come over was difficult, because not only was the road not visible, we were walking on branches that were well above the guardrail, itself not visible unless your foot fell through the web of branches and made a hole to look down and see it. The only path I could find was right over the guardrail at the edge of the cliff, so if you slipped in an unlucky way, you'd slice your foot on the top of the guardrail, or tumble down into the river.

At this point we met two workers walking from the other direction, and they helped John and Joshua with their bikes.

They said that they had been walking for an hour, and that there were maybe six or seven more almost-impassable sections like the one we were on. It turns out that this was wildly underestimated.

I'm guessing that the cut trees in the photo above are part of the massive damage from last year's Typhoon #21. The fallen utility pole and the slight landslide are from this year.

At times we faced such a daunting task to get past a section, we thought to turn back. But we knew how tough it would be to retrace our steps, and imagined that it couldn't be that bad going forward.

We were wrong.

We were stumped on how to get past this section when out from it came two guys...

They had found a long, low tunnel through the debris on the inside edge of the road, and so we dragged our bikes through it.

If that was their truck, the road was open from here on into the city. It had taken an hour and a half to travel about 4km (2.5mi), a stretch of road that normally takes just a few (~6 or 7) minutes.

We're lucky that there were no real landslides, as they can often take out a huge chunk of road, leaving absolutely no way to pass (such as seen here).

As it was we were lucky and could make it through. I was covered in scratched and bathed in sweat, and had lost the auto-retracting lens cap for my camera, a cleat cover, and ended up trashing my cleats. First world problems.

I imagine it'll be a long time before the road will be open.

On the way home, I swung by the Heian Shrine to see what had become of the tree that had fallen across the road the previous afternoon....

Here's the ride at Strava.

In my previous post, “SUPER FUN!! Cycling in Supertyphoon Jebi (2018 Typhoon #21)”, I wrote about cycling while the biggest typhoon in 25 years approached Kyoto. The next day, with fine summer weather, I set off with Joshua Levine and John Chen to see how some of the mountain roads had fared.

Our concern was well founded, as seen in the incredible devastation by a typhoon a year ago (“2017’s Typhoon #21, Lan, was Quite the Doozy”).

We headed out toward Kyomi Pass, on the same road that I'd been on the previous day as the typhoon approached....

This is near where I had turned around the previous day. The main storm came through perhaps an hour and a half later, I suppose.

Today, we continued on...

This spring, where we often stop to fill our water bottles, is not far below the pass. The “nearby photos” link below the photo brings up previous blog posts where this spring was featured.

After filling up, we continued on our way deeper into the mountains...

We took the turn toward Mochikoshi Pass. In essence, we had started a clockwise “Kyoto Heart Loop”, and were working on the western half.

We finally came across a crew working to clear the road, and without prompting we were verbally attacked by one of the workers. His lashing out was entirely uncalled for; someone apparently higher up in the food chain of this group stepped in to allow us to pass.

As we moved away from the area, we passed all the parked cars of the workers, and as we continued toward Mochikoshi Pass, more cars came. This told us that the road ahead was open all the way to the city, as it was the only other way to reach this point. This was good news, and was opposite to what happened last year, as the destruction seen in the previously-mentioned post about last year's typhoon was all on that road that we were soon to return to the city on.

It hadn't been completely unscathed, as we came across one beefy tree that had been cleared:

John had never been on this road, so I was pleased to tell him that it was all downhill from here... a lovely 10-minutes of coasting through pretty woods.....

But then we came to this:

We were bewildered... where did all the cars we'd seen before come from? They could not possibly have passed here.

The farmer who lived here said that we shouldn't try to go forward, because it's totally impassable even on foot.

It slowly dawned on us that the workers had not come from the city, but from the sporadic houses and sparse villages between where we met the workers trying to clear the road, and here. They weren't the city crew dispatched to clear the road; they were residents trying to get out, trying to clear away for people and goods and medical service. Trying to reestablish a lifeline.

Now I could understand why the guy had snapped at us; I imagine it was an extremely stressful situation.

In any case, despite the farmer's warning, we went past the downed utility pole and headed toward town.

Nothing I'd seen today, or last year, or ever, prepared me for what we were to encounter.

Continued here...