These first two photos, from a side area at Kyoto's Sennyuji Temple, probably don't look like much in the thumbnails here on the blog, but clicking through to larger versions and they have a certain "presence", especially the first one. Or maybe it's just me, but I like them.

One side held a quaint little rest area...

The ceiling was woven (bamboo, I suppose)...

Wandering further around the fringes of the huge-but-ill-defined temple area, I came across a sub temple with a nice entrance garden...

One of its buildings has a wide veranda with a roof of exposed beams, that [...]

In our second drive through the rural mountains of Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) that I most recently wrote about the other day in "Pleasant Little Village in Uji, Part 2", after leaving that village we wound our way north for half an hour (for what turned out to be only a mile and a half as the crow flies!) and had to stop when we came across some extremely vivid flowers at the end of someone's driveway.

I didn't realize it until I went to check the photo times between the village and these flowers, to see how long [...]

In "Pleasant Little Village in Uji" last month, I showed photos from the edge of a small remote village in Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) of maybe a dozen houses scattered about. Today's photos are from the other edge of the village...

Considering the similar shots in "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" and "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" (both from a trip the week prior to the one that produced today's photos), I'm probably overdoing these a bit, but I like them and it's my blog, so here we [...]

Yesterday I posted a few pictures in Part 1 on a particularly photogenic ravine first seen in last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto".

This post is a bunch more, mostly without comment.

First, again, here is the view from the road...

I climbed up into that for the rest of the pictures.

The trees aren't actually all that tall... maybe 25-30m (~7 or 8 stories tall), but they're plenty tall enough to awe.

This next one isn't much in the thumbnail version, but it's quite something else when viewed full screen...

While heading back down, I came [...]

On the way to Pierre Nadeau's sword smithy in May, we came across the photogenic Zaobashi Bridge (蔵王橋) in the rural mountains of Aridagawacho City, in Wakayama Prefecture.

It's a short (160m) bare suspension bridge made of steel... steel grid plates that form the surface of the bridge, bolted on top of simple steel I-beams suspended with steel cables to even bigger steel cables draped over two steel towers. It makes it quite easy to see how all the parts conspire against gravity. It's also photogenic. The people in the photo above were the only ones to stop by while [...]