Instead of writing up the full blog post about my visit the other day to Suntory's Yamazaki Distillery, I instead did a short bicycle ride to the area, to investigate all the short-but-steep roads nestled in where the city meets the mountain.

On the way, I went through the belly of the sprawling Yamazaki Junction, mentioned in a comment on the blog post where I featured photos of the rat's-nest Kumiyama Junction....

It's much more complex than the one I wrote about before, but much less photogenic...

It's more complex in that it includes an entrance and an exit that [...]

Some photos from this ride that I did yesterday...

On the way out of the city, I swung by the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine to see their famous plum blossoms...

The Kitano Tenmangu Shrine is known for its plum blossoms (seen many times on my blog, such as here, here, and here), but is also richly photogenic in its own right.

I then headed over to Arashiyama and mountains west...

After taking the photo above, I realized that I'd never taken the road leading off to the left, so did.

A far cry from the first time I took in this [...]

Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine (and many shrines around Japan). I've written about the overall festival earlier, such as "Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons" nine years ago, and "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" five years ago.

Today I went only to watch the final bonfire event. I explain it in some detail in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine" from nine years ago, and so like this post from five years ago, this time are just some photos.

I wandered over to the shrine about half an hour before the [...]

Two weeks ago we had a fair bit of snow in Kyoto (a rarity, since many years we have none), so that probably meant that the mountains in the north (which get lots of snow) were impassable, so I took a bicycle ride south-west towards Kobe. I still found snow.

Here's the 100km ride:

The first climb was the eastern Yanagidani climb, which I had descended before but never ridden up. I took my time, stopping for photos like the above when I ascended above the snow line, and at one point to help a group of elderly hikers find [...]

I had a long and interesting bicycle ride down to Osaka last weekend that I've been wanting to write about, and I thought I might finally get around to it yesterday, but I went on a ride instead. Today, I'll just share some pictures from yesterday's shorter (76km/48mi) ride (view at Strava).

First I visited a bump of a hill covered in bamboo and bamboo farming, with quaint roads running here and there through it.

I didn't know what to expect when I got to the bamboo-grove hill ("mountain" is too much for this), but the road I happen to [...]