Brian Chu Photography

Following my string of rants about film and such, I realized I haven’t written a “regular” post on this blog yet. So taking a page from Mike’s blog I’m going to do this one reporter style 😀

Date: Last week, Wednesday (4/14)

It was the day after my birthday, so I felt I needed a break since I’d worked all Tuesday. I’d been wanting to go to Mitake (三多気) in the western part of Tsu. It’s basically out in Nara. When I mentioned this to my friend Dave who wanted to go to Nara, we decided to hit up Mitake in the morning and then head to Nara in the afternoon.

We made it to Mitake in the morning at around 10, even after getting lost for a bit. It was actually good timing because it was clearing up just a little, though still quite windy. There were maybe 30 photogs or so already taking away so we joined them after a nice hike up. This is what everyone was after:

And a vertical snap:

These were both taken with my s90 – pretty amazing the quality that comes out of that little body. I don’t ever feel the need to carry around my 7D with my when I’m shooting landscapes – though that’s also because I was packing both my film bodies as well! Most of the good light was capture on film (slides) and then I took some photos for y’all to see on the s90 🙂

Just as we were leaving the next crowd came by – 3 bus loads of em!

Good timing on our part? Maybe we were just fortuitous.

After that we moseyed on down to Nara. Stopped by Uda-Shi (宇多市) to have some lunch at a cafe and then headed out towards Yoshino. Along the way we saw a river with a nice path of sakura and some koi-nobori (鯉のぼり).

One of the houses along the walk:

Down the path (most of the petals had already fallen):

From atop a bridge:

We wanted to find a shrine listed on one of our maps but couldn’t; instead we stumbled upon this small road side shrine, lured in by the bright orange bridge:

Inside were these brilliant orange tori gates:

Finally, as we were crossing the border back to Mie, we happened to see some signs pointing towards a place that heralded “1000 Sakura” (千本ざくら). Not really believing it but curious nonetheless, we ventured in to see what it was all about (we had a couple hours to kill). Boy were we in for a surprise! After a 20 minute hike up…

We were treated to this magnificant sight:

Rows upon rows of shidare zakura, all in full bloom. The elevation and cooler temps up on the mountainside keeps them from blooming until later in the season, which meant that a week and a half after most other places had begun falling, this area was just perfect!

More from Takami no Kyou (高見の卿):

Overall a great day off followed by a big dinner at Osho(王将). Dave even picked up the tab as a late birthday present 😀 This year’s sakura definitely went out with a bang – must have been to 10 different places this year but these were defnitely worthy of my last trip of the year.