A night at Odairajuku

Our house for the night at Odairajuku

A couple of weeks ago a group Iida english teachers took advantage of a day off school to spend the night in an abandoned settlement known as Odairajuku (大平宿). Well, that's what someone told me it was.

The drive up was like something from a Stephen King novel. That night a hefty storm was moving across the area and the drive into the mountains to Odaira was fraught with rain and wind, slow speeds and tight corners, giant toads and other beasties!

Anyway, there are several houses in the settlement that are available to rent overnight (or longer), so that's what we did. A night of barbequed food, drinks and not so good drinking games. Fun, at the very least.

And on the way down the following day Jackson and I saw our first monkey, despite my first impression that it was a small bear of some sort...

Silver Week

This week has been Silver Week in Japan, and although I didn't travel in Japan like a lot of people do, I still managed to pack in some excellent stuff - it's not really possible to have an unfulfilling day here, unless you have your eyes and ears shut!



On Sunday afternoon I headed out towards the Southern Japanese Alps that stretch along the east border of my village to find a lake I'd seen on a map. I discovered the lake was part of a campsite/country park, and as such it was populated by campers and fisherman. It was so relaxing to just sit by the water and listen to the sploshing of the lone canoeist paddling around. The setting sun gave the trees a striped appearance, although my camera couldn't really pick the trees out with the strong sun bearing down.

Matsukawa dam





On Wednesday, after stuffing ourselves with Japanese curry, Marion and I headed up through her town to take a wander around the dam there. After a short drive we came out into a big valley blanketed by trees and dominated by the fairly large dam. We stopped for some pics and to take in the beauty of our surroundings.





We headed further up the mountain and after rounding a corner suddenly spotted a prehistoric beast lurching its way across the road. We got out and approached it...





... it was a huge mountain toad! The light rain had obviously brought it out of the undergrowth, but it didn't mind posing for a few pics before it crawled away. Toads in the UK are big, but not like this. It was quite the experience.

On the way down we stopped briefly at the shrine at the base of the mountain, before heading to the onsen at Matsukawa. Bliss!