Polkadot Jersey

I've been doing a lot of riding in the mountains lately. This weekend I've covered around 100km, all of it enjoyable. Even the unintentional addition to my trip up the valley on Friday, where reason prevailed over sense of direction and sent me in the opposite direction to where I needed to go, adding about 20km to my day's ride. It helps that ive been able to just set my own pace, and the Love Bike's super new gears make a big difference.

Today, I visited what will become my Other Favourite Temple. Saizen-ji, just out of Yokoze, which is the next town along the road into Tokyo from Chichibu.



Its a lovely, quiet place with the most gorgeous Momiji (Japanese Maple) I think ive seen anywhere in Japan. Its very large and very old, and Im really looking forward to revisiting it as autumn progresses, to see it change colour.

I tested out my new camp stove sitting on a wooden bench underneath it - cooked up udon noodles in a miso broth.

While I was there, a few other folks passed though - of note was an old Japanese guy, who pulled out a case that had half a dozen harmonica in it and proceeded to play a gorgeous song, which on asking turned out to be a song about Momiji...


Inspired by that, I waited till noone else was around and pulled out my flute and played a bit. I've had a bit of a breakthrough in the last week thats made a big improvement in my playing. I think its now probably good enough to air in public, but I'm still a bit shy, especially in a lovely place like this, where the feeling of quiet is part of what makes it. So I played the first half of Sanya very softly, then headed for home. [update: Ive been told the tree is over 600 years old!]

But not before stopping in at the wonderful home-made Ice Cream shop that Megumi took us to last time I was here. Real matcha (green tea) ice cream is pretty special stuff :)