As I mentioned in this morning's post, I went out today again with Shimada-san and Paul Barr on a photographic excursion in the mountains, this time to some remote mountains in northern Kyoto, a bit further north from the small village of Kumogahata. Our first stop was at a slightly wide enough point on a dead-end logging road that stabbed deep into the wilderness....

It was raining pretty much the whole time, which made for some inconvenience with the camera, but it sure made for lush green views.

Much of the area was unkept wilderness, with trees lying where they [...]

For the past two Thursdays I've headed out on photo expeditions to the twisty rural mountain roads of Uji City (southeast of Kyoto) with Shimada-san and Paul Barr. Today we'll switch it up and hit some mountain villages to the north of Kyoto, but I've still got so much from the earlier trips I want to post. Since we're leaving in a few minutes, I'll just post a few quick shots from the first trip, which has already yielded "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" and "Rural Uji's Kiyotakigyuu Shrine", among others...

While driving through a deeply-forested [...]

Fumie is in the thick for preparations for her fall ballet recital, but she took a rare day off on Sunday for an outing up to the Sanzen-in Temple (三千院), half an hour's drive to the mountains north-east of Kyoto. She particularly wanted to see the hydrangea they're somewhat known for, and since they were having a "hydrangea festival" (あじさい祭), the timing seemed fortuitous.

Anthony got a pre-visit snack of mitarash dango at a shop just outside the entrance...

He couldn't eat them all, but the sauce is a bit too sweet for my taste, so we formed a symbiotic [...]

As I mentioned in "What It Looks Like When Tiered Rice Paddies Go to Seed" the other day, I recently took another trip with Shimada-san and Paul Barr to the middle-of-nowhere mountains of Uji City (south-east of Kyoto).

On the way to the first spot we'd marked on the map, while winding through a thin mountain road, we came across an unmarked side road that Shimada-san knew lead to a dam (one dating to a power generator built almost 100 years ago). He knew that the road was closed off at some point along the way, but otherwise we didn't [...]

I went on an outing today again with Shimada-san and Paul Barr, to the deep rural mountains of Uji City, southeast of Kyoto. We went a week ago and had a wonderful time, though I've barely had a chance to look over that day's photos. (From that day I've posted only a few flowers, some small-village farming scenes, and a bunch of shots from a small local shrine.) Today we went on some different roads and discovered even more remote, more pleasant areas. It was wonderful.

The photo above, of a set of tiered rice paddies that had been disused [...]