21 days in Japan - my photo book
Uploaded September 1st, 2013
Hi folks!I've spent my summer vacation in Japan. That was from June 30th, 2013 to July 21st, 2013.
I present you the pictures I've taken during that time. The indoor pictures, mostly taken in museums and exibitions, might be a bit blurry since flash photography was forbidden almost everywhere; so I have had high exposure times. (Btw. I went to much more places, but most of them did not permit photography at all!)
You also happen to see some outdoor pictures which are blurry. That happened due to the fact that I was taking some pictures whilst walking; I had my reasons for that.
I stayed the first week in Shin-Osaka; a pretty good location if you want to visit the western part of Japan. For the second week I moved to Nagano and visited places in that region. Beware that in the region of Nagano are hardly any "regular" tourists. You should speak at least a good portion of Japanese to communicate with the people since people there (even in the tourist information offices!) do hardly speak English! Besides that this region has a very nice nature and it pretty good suited for hikings. You'll really enjoy staying among Japanese "country tourists" and not being among "ill mannered" foreigners. Though some places can only be visited with a rental car. So, if you intend to visit them then you should have you driver license translated in your local town office. (I really wished I could have visted this cool waterfall place I saw in the pamphlet I got back then.)
Ah, by the way, you can find a soba museum in Togakushi. Well, it's not really a museum, but you can learn how to make your own soba noodles and you have to eat them afterwards; it's pretty fun (you need to understand Japanese language since they don't know English; but you receive the recipe in English - strange, I know). Hey, no joke I ate a four men serving since no one besides me was in the shop (that's the regular outcome of the ingredients used). Though, I had no problem with it and the ladies were pretty much astonished that I could eat that much. I mean, I walked almost complete (!) Togakushi the entire day and had nothing to eat since breakfast... (I've made a picture of the serving; see for yourself). About the "almost": I did not walk the last few kilometers to the soba museum, since I was (partly) lost (once again) and a nice elderly couple picked me up and drove me there. They also were quite surprised that I made the walk from the inner circle to the outer ring in mere hours. I really advise you to take the bus to the inner circle and have a fantastic walk in the nature. A view of it can be found in the link below.
Finally, I've moved to Tokyo where I did my "hellish ascend" to the summit of Mt. Fuji. The way up to the mountain fortress in Togura was a steep climb, but nothing compared to what waited here for me ... I went there from the train station in the city beneath Mt. Fuji up to the summit! It was a straight march of 15-16h hours until I reached the summit.
During the whole trip - from the Hotel, to the city beneath Mt. Fuji, up to the summit, back down to the city and back to the hotel in Tokyo - I did NOT sleep for around 36 hours at all.
My baggage load was around 15kg; 3kg alone are the weight of my shoes, other than that a few litres of water and a tent. As for food, I just carried four oni giri with me; I ate three of them. And I had a nice mushroom curry in a lodge which I found between the exit of the forests (station 4) and station 5. I really advise you to keep eating to a bare minimum; it won't do good to you to eat too much! And yes, I had a tent with me since I thought I'd stay in the woods over night. But I reached a point where it was impossible to put up a tent due to the rocky grounds and since it was dark, cooled down and no bus would be coming until next morning I decided to climb up the rest of the mountain to reach the summit around dawn. It was steep, extreme steep and extreme dark and I was pretty much exhausted due to the lack of sleep. Nevertheless, I didn't give up and marched on and on. It took me some more breaks than planned, but I was rewarded with a very nice sun rise and after gazing at it with awe I continued my way up to the summit. It was an extreme trip to the top and most might have given up, but if you have the will power you can do it. Show yourself what you can manage; it's a life experience you'll never forget! (And greetings to the young foreign couple I've met before the summit if you both ever happen to stumble accross this page!)
Enough of talks! Enjoy the pictures!
The pictures are shown in the chronological order I've visited the places.
By the way I've a small collection of videos. So check them out if you want.
(My apologies if you hoped for a whole lot more videos, but photo camera and video camera at the same time... You need to decide what's worth of being captured in motion and what not at some point.)