I think so! Some amazing colors to be seen at a local park:

A vibrant red bloom:

Approaching the garden. People sat in awe of the beauty:

This is one plant with blooms of various shades of pink. Amazing huh? …

p.s. I’m not really a flower person at all but the vibrant colors in the middle of this urban landscape makes it truly amazing to see. Some of the buildings around here are really ugly but then there is a visual paradise like this to stumble across Like most digital camera owners, I am in a clicking frenzy in a place like this and almost forgot I took them. So after a few days I was reminded by my other half to post the pics.

We had a day trip to Tateyama. It’s in the top 3 of most worshipped mountain areas in Japan and spectacular scenes to see.

You get near the top via a funicular railway to a bus terminal.

Then it’s a coach journey for 50 minutes via a very twisty mountain road with great views of the landscape. Along the way we were shown a tree that was over 1000 years old:

First there was the mountains, valley with river and forest with some snow.

Then there is lots of snow and the road is cutting a path through the snow. The snow wall lining the road gets higher and higher until, at the complex near the top, the snow wall is 17 meters high!

After getting off the bus, you can walk over to have a close look at the snow wall. It’s incredible that so much snow is dug out after winter to get to the road and it all melts in Summer.

There is a hotel plus restaurant area where you can branch out to explore the area.

In one direction is a frozen lake and volcanic activity where it smells of suplhur and steam is coming out of rocks. There is a hot spa (highest in Japan) using the water from the spring.

You also have the mountains. One of which we clambered up to get some great views.

Climbing up there was very hard work since the air is thin. So we were pretty exhausted by the time we got up there. Coming down was fairly easy though.

During Golden Week we had a very interesting experience with a BBQ party inside the Bamboo forest.

We received expert tuition in harvesting the Bamboo shoots:

It was hard too see people inside the Bamboo forest:

Later on we had a BBQ party using where we ate the sliced bamboo shoots in the form of Tempura and in soup. There was some open space where we parked our vehicles and set up a grill with coals. There were grills with meat and peppers. Also, some miso soup was being boiled in a pot. Another cool thing was a section of Bamboo being used as a kind of oven to cook rice.

I heard this bamboo grows at up to 2 metres per day and there are so many shoots, that it’s necessary to harvest them to thin out the forest. Now it’s the season for them.

Taste-wise I would say it’s between potatoe and sweed. So not incredibly tastety but nice, fresh and slightly crunchy.

A couple of days later we went back and harvested some more to give to neighbours.

Just before Golden Week we had a dance festival where lots of different dance styles were performed.

Here are some of the kites that are found in abundance around this time of year:

Hot on the heels of the Sakura season was a big Tulip Festival. Lot’s of colorful tulips were to be seen.