Near the Alps

Another wonderful trip with Sister Kondo and Sister Morita.  We drove a bit over an hour up into the mountains.  At first it was freeway, but then we headed up along the Kiso River Valley along narrower, winding roads to see more extremely beautiful scenery.  Japan never ceases to surprise me.

Beautiful homes clustered together, and beautiful rice fields and gardens.
The mountains in the distance add a wonderful backdrop.

There is a string of about 36 little villages along the river in the mountain valleys and  it was lush green everywhere.  This is the route that was used for hundreds of years when people needed to walk from the south to the north or vice versa.  I don’t know if many people walked it in the winter, but they did in the summer.  

This is where people used to leave messages for each other.  The local "post office" of many years ago.

Samarai warriors lived in some of these areas and in several places the homes from 400 years ago have been preserved.  We went to two towns like this, and the wood of the buildings is almost black. 

This is one of the Japanese versions of ramen.
It puts the cheap stuff you buy in the US all to shame.
It was incredibly delicious.

You are looking at a 400-year-old floor.

We ate at a restaurant where the food was wonderful.  We thought the floors were concrete--they certainly looked like it, but they were dirt—so long packed down.  The restaurant had been there for 400 years.  It was awesome.  

We also walked a beautiful pathway down to the Kiso River where we climbed down some huge boulders and climbed up on to some massive rocks to the middle of the river.  The rocks were so big they stuck out of the river and were close enough together and flat on top, so that we could walk from one rock to the next, once we got in the river area.  What was amazing to me was that Sister Kondo, once again—she’s 79, went with us and climbed those rocks just like the rest of us.  She constantly surprises me.

One little bunch of brightness amid all the massive rocks.

At the villages, we also bought a few things—a couple of wooden spoons for the kitchen, and a few small toys for the grandchildren.  A couple of cool things they had that we didn’t buy were some woven horses in all sizes, probably most often used as children’s toys back then.  They were made from rice straw.  And also from rice straw were the slippers, more like flip flops, that the people wore as they walked the many miles.  They would need to purchase or weave new ones as they went, because they wouldn’t last the entire trip.  

Some famous Samurai warriors climbed these steps.

I wondered if this black wood had been painted, (it didn't look like it) or if it looks like that when it's that old.

A fountain on left, and a special rock of some kind on right.

These people didn't walk the whole Kiso River Valley,
but they kind of felt like it.

I think this is a spinning wheel, but not sure.

There were businesses all along here.  The people aren't allowed to change the front of their homes.

These old towns where we walked along the streets were really cool.  The homes look so old, and some of them smelled old when we went in.  The only ones we went into had been made into shops, and they sold lots of touristy things, but some things were unusual and interesting, and it was fun at one spot to watch some women weaving Chinese hats.  In one place they had roasted chestnuts, and they offered us each one to sample.  Really good.  (But then I started singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” to myself.)  We drank some water out of a little pipe that was running into a wooden barrel, which is how it would have been 400 years ago.  

There are very few, if any, places you can go in Japan without seeing a shrine.
But isn't this one pretty.

People needed a place to get a drink, so this little spring
running into an old barrel was available to dip out of.

So I tried it.  It was fresh and good, and I'm still alive.
(But I didn't dip.)

One of the ladies weaving Chinese hats.

This old guy greeted us at one of the shops.  I think he was once a tree.

This caught my interest.  If your roof gets old and you are
afraid it will blow away in the wind, here's what you can do.

Ditto.

One of the prettier sections of this old town.

I love seeing and learning about Japan.  

So it's time for some more beauty shop names:  Hair Style Leaf, Dope Hair, and Opera Hair.  (Some mornings I'm sure I've been to Dope Hair during the night.)