Today's been particularly busy, email-wise, after yesterday's post, but I'd like to at least post something today. Here are a bunch more bamboo-related pics from my recent western-Kyoto mountain drive....

I'm guessing that the CDs were to scare off crows or cats... I've seen them used for that before. Not sure why either would bother a bamboo grove, so maybe I'm off base.

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I took a ride out to the mountains in the south-west of Kyoto, where I'd not been before. Here's a summary...

I'd headed toward a road that looked like it wound up to the top of a mountain that should provide a commanding vista, but it turns out that the road has been closed to public traffic for the last 10 years. The road-closed gate was a perfect spot to dump your trash, apparently, because there was plenty all around. Sigh.

I had another mountain road in mind, but had to dip back into civilization to get to it...

(It [...]

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Coming up next week is the festival of setsubun, which I wrote about after last year's events: Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons. Among the variety of events are the demon-driving-out highlighted in that post, and a ceremonial bonfire (so to speak) that I wrote about in Intense Burn.

February 3rd falls on a weekday this year, so I won't be able to attend the photogenic events at the Heian Shrine, but I thought I'd share photos from one more event from last year, the "throwing of the beans".

As I wrote last year, the beans represent goodness and [...]

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I posted the other day a nice picture of the sun streaming down to light a bridge that I took during our New-Year's trip to Okinawa, and on that post I lamented about the general unexciting flatness of the pictures from that day.

Still, the visit to the small island was a fun excursion, so dull photo or not, here they come...

Kouri Island is a small, generally circular island about a mile and a quarter across, less than a mile offshore from the Okinawa mainland. It's connected by a big bridge, but not directly: you have to cross three [...]

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NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size. Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2000 — map & image data — nearby photos Ready to Serve […]
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