Back to Japan for even more - Oct and Nov 2017 - Page 5

Another 'blue' sky day in Japan. I use quotes because it has become badly polluted.
And on that note, South Korea recently found out that over 90% of their pollution is domestic, and not blown over from China, NASA did the study, its been big news there for a while.
I therefore expect that the pollution in Japan is all domestic, as its a lot further from China than South Korea, which is a short swim from the very highly industrial parts of northern China where nothing grows.

I changed lines once on my way to my destination, I enjoy shots like this.

Once you get off the train, its about a 20 minute walk to the start of the hiking trail. I like those big buildings on the top of the hill.

Its a shame about the pollution. I also read that the water in this river is very badly polluted, and whatever you do, do not be tempted to go for a swim, people have reported getting acid burns!
There is also a huge quarry just to the left of this shot destroying a mountain from the top down, still its a nice looking area!
And by the way, the red bridge I am standing on, thats not the way to the hiking trail, do not cross the red bridge, keep going. I knew this, I just wandered across to take photos.

And now the real hike begins, with huge spectacular rocks in the raging river, and some nice foliage to admire.
It would be great for white water rafting if the water wasnt sulphuric acid mixed with nerve gas.

A view back the other way. Ordinarily I say mountains look smaller than they really are, in this shot I say they look bigger than they really are.

This is an example of a new pedestrian bridge thats been installed, and also other people. Lots and lots of other people, on a weekday.
The trail must have been added to official Japanese hiking books, there were groups of school kids enjoying an excursion along the trail.

Nice contrast between haze on the left, color on the right.

The first tunnel entrance. The first tunnel is straight, you probably dont need a torch, although you do walk over railway sleepers so might trip.

Bumped exposure and shadows, I like these shots.

Water reflections. Japanese people would FREAK OUT if the water dripped on them, maybe its bad luck or something, but they really get hysterical about it.

Out the other side and you are in a secluded valley now.

And now it was time to get out my trusty old friend, the torch. I bought this torch here last time I visited this tunnel.
I remembered I had bought it years ago just before I left for this trip, so carried it all the way back to Japan.
It has not been used at all between trips, I turned it on for 3 seconds before packing it to make sure it still works, original batteries, and it does.
So its waited years between uses, and both times, in the same tunnel.

The second tunnel is the longer one, about a km long, and it has 2 bends in it, so the middle section is genuinely pitch black. You need a torch. Out the other side, more secluded valley.

And more.

And another for good measure.

Now I am approaching the bridge, it used to require you to climb along a rusty metal gangway down one side....

Now theres a pedestrian wooden bridge right up the middle with the gangways blocked off.

Completely derisked.

Just a couple to go, nearing the end here.

This is all new, none of this was here last time. Its a car park! Before the only way out was to go up a set of stairs into the train station inside a tunnel.
Now there is a bus stop.

I took a knee to protest man-bashing.

And like I said, I got off at Itami for lunch, to complete my day of doing what I did years ago.

The inside of the megamall is very much like you would find in Australia, these do exist in Japan, but not in the middle of cities, only out in the suburbs.
I wrote the same thing here last time I visited the same mall.

The path to Umeda starts at more covered shopping streets, quieter ones this time.

Along the way I passed a walking stick shop, thats all they sell! It occurred to me, in Japan you see some really old people going along really slowly, hunched over with a walking stick.
You never ever see people on a gopher (motorized old person scooter). I think they are an unknown concept to the Japanese. Maybe I can corner the market?

I really like the huge roof over the JR Osaka station.

That truck is an advertising truck, with music blasting. This one is just video screens, but there are live performance trucks too that have pop stars singing (miming) in traffic.

People moving from one giant station to another giant station using the overpasses. Also note the giant xmas tree, its already peak xmas in Japan, every store is playing annoyingly happy jingles.

Yodobashi here is particularly enormous. I didnt even go in.

Here is the giant ferris wheel, and a store that looks like a computer tower case.

A bit more ferris wheel on a brightly lit corner.

Umeda also has a whole heap of covered shopping streets, but they are more for locals and contain bars, karaoke, strip clubs etc.

Hankyu has a heap of xmas display windows with animated characters. Heres a whole heap of drunken elves.

The Hankyu exhibition hall is celebrating Italy (I think?) featuring the Italian painting thats kept in France.

And finally, my dinner, which is a hamburger steak on top of a couple of vegetables, with Japanese style mystery sauce, an egg, mushrooms and a baked potato. The potato was the best bit actually.

I got up early, and was rewarded with great light for this photo which was taken right by my hotel.

That is actually a rock climbing wall, and for whatever reason it appears as though they can hoist it up higher on the outside of this building.
Either that or they are going to build more onto it.

It was at this point I got off to back track having realised I was heading off into rural areas unexpectedly.
However, I was able to take this photo whilst waiting for a train in the opposite direction. The light today was pollution twilight all day.

After my brief detour, I was at JR Nara station, and I could taste smoke in the air. I checked the air quality index and it was about 200! Hazardous to health!
I blame farmers burning crops.

Before I headed up the hill, I headed down the hill, google maps showed a big green area with castle ruins. It was not green at all! It appears as though its about to be a huge housing development.
There were lines of people registering to buy blocks of land.

This huge open field is for now, the castle ruins, theres nothing to see here really. But theres lots of people and a couple of different fairs going on.

Right in the middle is this 'attraction'. Not your best work Japan. This whole area reminded me of something you might see in a Chinese city no ones heard of - huge, lots of people for no apparent reason, dusty.

And of course, a full band playing in the dusty middle of the wasteland with no shade and an amazingly high quality public address system. Quite bizarre.

Time to head back up the hill, I passed this car with a lot of distracting woolen animals blocking the drivers view. You see this often, but I believe these ones are all home made, so I rewarded her efforts with a photo. I am going to presume its a her.

In the suburbs of Nara I passed this huge shopping mall, no time for lunch today, I kept going. Nara is much bigger than I realised though.

Now I am back in deer town. Here is the pagoda. The number of tourists was pretty overwhelming.

More fairs, selling corvettes.

Deer everywhere. Everyone does deer pics, I remained somewhat restrained.

There really were a huge number of people. It was never uncomfortably busy, just surprisingly so.

Deer wedding pics.

Ahhhh, color. Everyone gasp.

When the deer have eaten enough, they dig themselves a mud pit and go to sleep.

Nearby you can pay to climb up this grassy hill and sit in the blazing sun. Or you can climb up over some rocks and photograph this rubbish bin!

TRAGEDY, thwarted again. Me and lots of other people expressed our disgust, path closed. I bet it was perfectly fine to climb over the fallen tree.
I couldnt just go and find out, a small man had been tasked with keeping me out. He had a radio in his ear like an FBI agent to call the special hiking trail police if I attempted to pass.

Instead I had to cut back through the plethora of temples. I didnt take many photos here, because I have before on my last visit, and I was in a hurry to find a path to hike up.

I found a path. This one also had a man, who spoke no English, but took me to the map board to explain where I could get to along this path.
He was very helpful.
A short way up and this tree was coated in plastic. I think its to stop people climbing it for photos.

This is part of the primordial forest, where logging and hunting has been banned for over 800 years. Looked like any other forest to me, with a better quality path.

Evetually I got to what I guess was the top, and had this lake all to myself! About half a kilometre before here the two paths I could use today merged, and thats where everyone else stopped and went back.
Surely the lake is the attraction?

The waters are brown looking, but big fish seemed to be flopping about in the water.

Some more pollution twilight.

I walked a full lap of the lake. Because the full looping trail was closed I would not get a view of Nara below today.
However it would have been very hazey anyway, so perhaps the lake is a better reward for my extended hiking efforts.

Stance. SHORTS TODAY! It was 23 degrees. I am standing on what I believe was an ancient dam, somewhere up here theres temple ruins but you cant go and see them its completely reabsorbed by primordial forest.

OK, selfie as well.

The path down was an ancient stone trail. The lighting was great for a lot of the time.

The path was however mossy and very very slippery at times. I ran where I could but often had to be careful.

Once back down I was in time for golden hour! And it was pretty great. I was kind of glad I had been delayed a couple of times.

Color turned down! Almost a matte effect on this photo.

Starting to get dark, everyone was oohing and ahhing.

And then I just had to descend down this street back to JR Nara station, through hordes of tourists, many of whom were watching guys beat rice flour with giant wooden hammers.
Now I need to go get dinner immediately! I barely ate all day again. So this long post is probably typo riddled.

A band is seranading the glico man sign, on a boat. Thats the sort of thing that can happen on a regular night in Osaka.

Its Friday night, Dotonbori is particularly busy, I had to move on quickly to find some dinner in a location where I was more likely to get in.

But first, here it is, dead case logic case, meat reborn case logic case. They are almost identical, I suspect they are supposed to be the same model but they changed the factory contracted to make them.
The store clerk was amused when I made him take it out of the packaging, stuck my camera in it, and handed him my old one to throw away.
He was also perplexed as to why I would take a photo of it all, whilst mouth trumpeting the last post to celebrate our fallen comrade.

My journey took me through Den Den town, I didnt have time to look in any shops, but its a great place! I needed more time in Osaka, and on that note, in Japan, holiday already half over.

Shinsekai, with the pyramid thing sticking up above.

Last time I came here it was very very quiet. Tonight only quiet, probably because its Friday.

Quiet means I could get into places to eat, Okonomyaki time. Here is the master maker.
You can smoke in here, luckily no one was.
A Japanese couple were very interested in me, and asked lots of questions in broken English.
When I explained how long I am in Japan for and how often I come they were amazed, how can anyone take so many holidays etc.
The guy told me he would emigrate to Australia immediately.

Here it is. I had the variety with added noodles, cause I was damn hungry. Although it was quite a small serve, but cheap!

Iconic shot every visitor to this place takes.

The covered shopping areas here are nothing to write home about, but I am anyway!
Nice fake plastic autumn leaves.

And here is Tennoji, another major commercial area of Osaka, not far from Namba really. I like an overpass!

The overpass allows long exposures of traffic. So I can get some starbursts.

This is actually the tallest building in Japan excluding the skytree which isnt actually a building.
It is only 65 storeys high, but in an earthquake plagued country, thats high enough.

Tennoji was very nice, lots of people, the zoo is nearby, and this is a huge park. On Friday night its full of people, and surrounded by little cafes. I had a chai latte.

Many wires, so many wires, so many people going home looking destroyed.

Yeah, nailed the light.

On my wander I found the Kuromon market, which not only has toilets, but also has lavatories.

Heres is a bit more market, one particular stall had a huge line, for cooked chicken wings, early in the morning.

There is also a line at the apple store, even though the new facial recognition failure device thats secretly storing your boob pics was released in Japan yesterday.

Near Shin-Osaka station I found a flea market. Some of the stuff for sale looks like it would be infested with actual fleas. Looks like a truck tipped a load of rubbish here.

I stopped for some quiche, cause I am not a real man. I was the only male in the place, everyone else was a woman passing the time with cake and coffee.

And here is my room, probably the nicest of the trip so far, too bad I will only be here for 2 nights.
It is the Sunroute Sopra Kobe Annesso. A bit of a short walk from the Kobe station, but theres lots of little covered shopping streets nearby.
I shall investigate soon.

At first I was underwhelmed, this is a shopping street, uncovered, near my hotel. Every few metres theres a man with a glowing baton.

I descended, and found a huge underground mall, but also these 3 archery targets on the ground. I worked out all they can be for is the world lawn darts championship, without a lawn.

I came up out of the underground in the harbourside area, and was greeted by lots of modern looking buildings and twinkling lights.

Oh, and a full moon and a ferris wheel. I couldnt get a shot without cars here.

Not a great photo, mainly here for my mother, I am standing on a shopping centre and theres a heap more across the road and under the ground.

The colorful harbour. The green lit building on the right is the maritime museum, it appears to be very large.

Moon lighting clouds. I tried some longer exposures here but found a shorter one worked better.

Then a dinner cruise pulled up. There was a crush of people trying to take a photo of it.

My dinner was awesome. There is a specific name for this but I forget what it is. There is an alcohol fuelled candle thing under the cast iron bowl.
This continues to cook whats in the bowl, and makes the rice go a bit crunchy. I ate it too fast to experience the full effect.
You can choose from lots of things, mine was beef and vegetables.
I waited here for over 30 minutes in a line, hence I never even got to Sannomiya this evening.

There are about 50 restaurants in this complex which are the old dock warehouse sheds.

Theres also a fun park for children, but you dont need to use that, just go to this mall with crazy escalators. Its quite a weird sensation.

Underneath is a very huge premium aeon supermarket. Its an upmarket version, not your standard aeon. There are 3 places to sit and eat inside the supermarket, including a pizza restaurant.
Also you can just buy the ready meals and sit and eat them, pick and choose from the sushi etc. This is a contender for best supermarket ever! I think that honor still goes to the Lotus supermarket in Pudong, Shanghai.

And finally, heres one of the closed covered shopping streets. I really cant understand how there are so many of them here? Either side of this one is a huge red light district. I am frightened to take photos there, there are enormous men out the front of every place with ear pieces in looking angry.

As promised, here is the lighting situation in my room. You can only control the main light with this remote. It took me ages to figure this out!
I have wondered before what the point of the stupid big round fluro lights are that take up entire floors in electronics shops. In those shops they have them all turned to full white, full bright.
With the remote you can control not only how bright it is, but also its color, and now I want one!

Final shot this evening, I climbed out my window onto the fire escape to perch my camera on a rail for a long exposure.
I dont really think I was supposed to do that! I could walk all the way along the metal gangway and look in peoples windows.