Matsumotojo (松本城)

Here is the pride of Matsumoto City. Matsumotojo (松本城) or Matsumoto castle. Its a 16th century 5 tiered castle and is the oldest of its kind still standing in Japan. Surrounded by a moat which is now surrounded by a nice garden/park and which is all surround my the mountains of the Japanese Alps.

I was lucky enough to live 10 mins from here. I will miss chilling here on Sunday afternoons.

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Ten Minutes

It's amazing how much can change in 10 mins, sun setting over the Japan Sea (日本海 - Nihonkai).

And a bonus that it's a nice and cruisy 2 min bike ride from my new apartment.

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Kamikochi (上高地) Pt. 2

So here are a couple more pictures from Kamikochi (上高地). The Kanji means 'upper highlands', the area is a 15km plateau in the Japanese Alps. I camped here in early May with a bunch of friends from Matsumoto.

This place is seriously amazing! It's so nice, surrounded by mountains with a river running through the middle and forest on either side and wild monkeys everywhere.

It was sub zero over night, impossible to sleep. Funny thing is we found out everyone was actually awake through the night but it was too freezing to pop your head out of the sleeping bag to talk. So for a good few hours we lay in silence and everyone thought everyone else was asleep lol!

This photo was taken at about 4-5am. Freezing temps and sunlight coming through so early meant minimal sleep. The first day was overcast, so we were all excited to see the sun, but after the sun rose, all of a sudden the weather changed dramatically. It became cloudy, the winds picked up and we got dumped with snow. Had to fight through the snow and build a fire for warmth. Most difficult fire to build when your getting owned by snow and strong winds. haha good times.

Kappabashi (Kappa-mythical Japanese creature that is green, has webbed feet and a beak and a disc on its head and eats cucumbers. Hashi- bridge. Hashi becomes -bashi when added with a name.)

Steps of Kappabashi.

Hoping to head back there next month now that it's summer!

P.S I uploaded more happy snaps from Kamikochi on Facebook if you want to have a lookie.

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Freezing Water at Kamikochi

Finally! I am back it has been way too long.

New country, new city, new layout and a new watermark.

Sorry for the neglect, as you can understand I have not had access to a computer. I have been borrowing a friends computer to transfer photos of my overloaded SD cards onto an external HD. Finally got a laptop last week and oh my goat I had 30gb of photos to sift through, which I still have not finished doing.

Few things to help navigate the new layout. From the home screen click the image for an enlarged version and click the title to take you to post. But if your reading this you probably figured that out. Comments are at the end of the post and the chat box is still there, feel free to spam me with love haha

Picture is from a place called Kamikochi which I camped a couple of nights in early May. Place is amazing, more pics to come.

For those interested pic is taken at , f/22 @ 10mm, 1/8 secs, ISO 200. Standing in the water with lens about 3 cm above the water. Hopefully providing this info will inspire the up and comers (looks at Lyhn and Harv) to get out and shoot and upload some awesome pics soon ;D

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