Nov. 10th: Adventures in the Mountains

Hola!

Spent the day driving around the Hida Takayama, Hirayu, and other beautiful areas in the mountains here in Central Japan. Took some really good pictures and video. Hard to sum up today in any other word than beautiful. The area up here is stunning, even though the weather was overcast all day. I tried to take a picture of the cool thing that the clouds do here where they hug the mountain so closely, but I don’t know if it’s easy to see…you tell me. It’s really beautiful how they seem to swallow the mountain.

After rolling out pretty leisurely at about 11 or so, we drove around for a while, then went to a cool little village area where we got some lunch. Here, we ran into a person that Dan knows. A nice old lady with a perma-smile and a warm personality. She told us – yes TOLD US – that we were going to come to her house for dinner at 5 tomorrow before we go to the soba club meeting. Apparently, this happens to Dan all the time. The people in this quaint little country town “take care of” Dan by organizing his social calendar ahead of time, and letting him know later…interesting. That’s Japanese hospitality for you.

After that, we drove around a little more, stopped at a few places, and drove around some more. Walked around, found this:

Another Picture:

I like the idea of Café Mustache…tasty.

As we were exploring, I took an alternate route up a hill, and ended up on the wrong side of this sign…oops, hehe.


This is a cool picture of me I think….the clouds are doing that cool thing in the background…Thank Dan for this one.

Later, we walked up to a really cool waterfall called Hirayu O-taki (Hirayu large waterfall):

This is more of that cool cloud effect again :-)



This is a sign that says “Ashi-Yu place”, which means “foot hot water place”.

I meant to take a picture of the actual thing, but forgot because of the Taiwanese people that were asking me to take pictures of them….oops. Right after the waterfall walk, we soaked our feet for a while and drank some interesting juices from berries grown in the region. Really relaxing and good feeling in the cold, cold weather.

More pretty pics from Monday: