The Blue Line

After we had finished eating our lunch at Kuriyama, we went for a drive up the Blue Line. It is a road that snakes up one side of Mt. Chokai to the fifth stage and then goes down the other side. The parking lot at the top of the Blue Line is as far as you can go up Mt. Chokai in a vehicle: you want to go further, you gotta leg it. Fifth stage is at nearly 1500m, which makes the 380m of the hills I pass over each week to get to Kamagadai seem piddly. I saw the wind turbines of the Nikaho Plateau from fifth stage, and they looked so far down. Near the top the Blue Line, even in May, is enclosed in huge snow walls. It takes until well into summer for the snow to melt away.

This photo is very hazy but you can just see the wind turbines on the Nikaho Plateau. To the right of them at the edge of the photo is Kamagadai.

Wow, I'm on an only semi-dormant volcano . . .

Yes, I stood on the edge of a huge cliff on slippery snow to take this photo. But I was inside the safety boundary, I swear . . .

Kuriyama Park

The second stop on the field trip was Kuriyama Park which is up in the hills above Kisakata, not far from Mototaki. The cherry blossoms have already fallen at the coast, but at Kuriyama on Monday they were in full bloom, so that was my second full bloom this spring, with at least one more to go when Kamagadai blooms. There were many different varieties of cherry at Kuriyama Park, unlike in most areas where the only variety that has been planted is the five-petal mid-sized pale variety favoured by the Japanese. No, at Kuriyama there were miniature blossom cherries, dark pink cherries, willow cherries, eight fold cherries, and probably some other varieties I missed.

After walking around the lake we had a picnic. It was very windy so it was hard to eat, but we managed it.

Ten years ago this was a river.

Apparently this is snow willow.

Mototaki

Monday was a national holiday. I went on a field trip with some of my adult English class students. They took me to some sightseeing spots in the area that no one else had ever thought to take me to before. I never knew there were so many sightseeing spots in Nikaho city! Why did no one tell me before?

First stop was Mototaki, a cold water spring in the foothills of Mt. Chokai above Kisakata town. In centuries past, people used to travel by horse to Mototaki to get water because at the source, Mototaki water was about as clean as water ever got. We collected water there. I have bottles of it sitting in my kitchen, and it is indeed very delicious and fresh, much more so than Konoura tap water, which is vile.

Cherry Blossoms

The other week the cherry trees here in Konoura were in full bloom so of course I went to take pictures of them.

Konoura Port

The same day I went to see the 33 Buddhas, Sumiko showed me some things I hadn't seen at Konoura port. We went to a tiny shrine that has monkey statues guarding the entrance rather than dogs which guard almost all non-Inari shrines (Inari shrines are guarded by foxes). One of the monkeys is eating an onigiri (rice ball). No one seems to know why. Then we went to see a new bridge that was built recently between the mainland and a tiny island. On the island is a tiny old shrine to one of the Seven Lucky Gods, but I can't remember which one.

Butterbur sprouts

33 Buddhas

While I have been taking so long to finish posting about Kyoto all sorts of things have been happening here. The reason I don't have much blogging time anymore is that I can no longer blog from work, and of course it is hard to find the motivation to sit down and blog when I get home from work.

About three or four weeks ago I went with Sumiko to tag along with a group of middle aged fishermens wives who sang hymns at each of 33 statues of the Buddha Kannon that are scattered about a temple, park and hill in Konoura and which were built to protect the fishermen of Konoura. Sumiko's mother was one of the ladies, which was why she knew about this little-known event. Here (like always) are a few pictures:

Sumiko and Machiko-san