Natsukashi Fall

On Sunday we went to Oyasukyo, which is a lovely gorge in the south of the prefecture where there are natural hot springs. The hot water bubbles out of splits in the rock at about 98degrees Celsius. In other cracks along the walkway it was a mist or a dribble with lots of hissing and spitting and reeking of sulfur. At one point there is a huge cloud of the steam to be walked through and it fogged my glasses up completely. There had been a mudslide recently so part of the trail was closed and visitors had to descend and ascend along the same trail, instead of being able to walk along the bottom of the gorge.
This apparently a very popular place to visit because it was quite crowded with people, even old people climbed the 60m of rather steep stairs up and down. Of course that made it rather difficult for me to get good, unoccupied pictures of the place, so here are some good ones that were small details.
I liked the leaves swirling down to the bottom like snow, the picture doesn't do the scene justice.



These were taken from the red iron bridge that spanned the gorge.
These two are to give a sense of where I was at the bottom, you can see the path and the billows of steam if you look closely. I don't think they are particularly good, but it shows looking over the edge of the bridge and the looking directly ahead to the north, I think.The point of this field trip was to see the fall colors, which we did. However it also showed me the merciless way the Japanese cut down swaths of their forest and the replant with only one kind of tree. Look below at the green cedars. They are all over the place in Akita, if not completely covering a hill, then marking very clearly where the straight lines of the clear cutting stopped. This cedar is a local tree and a cartoon version is the perfectural mascot, it really weirded me out when I first saw one. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but when I stayed at Plaza Krypton they had some trees directly in front of the huge lobby windows facing the hill that somehow had cartoon eyes and a big red smile stuck to them. For the sports festival the had the tree in all manner of sports, even carrying a rifle for marksmanship or wearing a gi for martial arts competitions.
We also went to a theme park called Akita Furusato Village, it was... not what we think of as a theme park, but that's what it was. There were regional arts and crafts, displayed in a museum setting as well as vendors where you could buy such things. There was a "Wonder Castle," a modern art museum with local artists, a planetarium, and other things to amuse young and old.
I had fun, but would definitely not pay money to go there again.

That's all for now.

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