A final post to round out Part 1 and Part 2 about this year's Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭), at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park last week, which is a parade of period costumes from a millennium or so ago.

As the parade participants were marshaling before the start, others were going about their business...

This particular rope was such a pain. When i took this picture the parade had already ended and the rope would soon be dismantled, but during and before the parade, the rope separated the crowd from the parade participants, and if the rope had been equally [...]

Picking up from yesterday's Part 1 of "My Mt. Hiei Climb Challenge 2013", where that post ended with a short pause at a clearing half way up...

From the clearing, the path up actually goes down sharply for a short while...

The trail goes up and down very steeply as it crosses several small river ravines, and this is where I worried that my knees would become debilitatingly painful. To my great relief it turned out fine, either because of the stretching I did (mentioned in Part 1), and/or because I was wearing a pair of knee compression straps that [...]

This post is a continuation, of sorts, of my first climb of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei, painfully documented a year ago in "Yesterday's Hike: The Agony Where Bravado Yields, In Spectacular Fashion, To Painful Reality". After that horrible experience, I vowed to get into better shape, and to repeat the hike in a year.

That year had passed, so I repeated the hike last Thursday.

After the first hike, I made a concerted effort to get into shape, and just six week later I showed some of my progress in "Going Max Cliché While Learning About Off-Camera Flash", and probably hit [...]

This post is a continuation from Part 1 of "Kyoto’s Amazing Haradanien Garden", with a bunch more photos that I hope gives a sense what it's like to visit at the height of cherry-blossom season.

I'll explain below why Haradanien (原谷苑) is wonderful despite the crowds, but make no mistake, it's very crowded.

It's crowded, but the layout of the garden, with wandering paths on a hillside, is masterful. There are people behind the lady posing above, but you can't see them, and that works well with the first rule of photography: "If It's Not in Frame, It Doesn't Exist".

Yesterday's post ("Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Haradanien Garden: John and Ai") has inspired me to at least start to try to show the magnificent Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-west Kyoto, a few kilometers in the mountains behind the Kinkakuji "Golden Pavilion" Temple. I'd made my first visit last week and from that trip had posted so far only one wigglegram, and then visited a few days ago for the photoshoot with John and Ai, and from that visit also posted some subtle pastel blossoms.

Having entrusted my route to get there to Google Maps on my iPhone, I unknowingly ended [...]