Few outdoor blog postings do I send out links to. And, usually, none do I email out to people who aren’t “in” to the outdoors. But yours I have.

I can think of no better way to express it.

Wow, Butuki, a month of walking! Can’t wait to hear what you get up to. Gotta say, I’m more than a little jealous..!

The photos above were taken from Kachidoki, just across the river from Tsukiji and Hamarikkyu gardens.

My university just got out for the summer and I’m getting ready for a month of walking. I think I might try to walk from the southern end of the South Alps and walk as far north as I can. I’d love to walk all the way to the Japan Sea, but just don’t have enough time. If I can’t lay out a good path that way I might take five days and walk from Kiyosato to Okutama, about five days. Whatever I do I’m spending as little time as possible here in Chiba, that’ for sure!

I’m off to Kyoto this weekend for some R&R, and will probably do a quick run up Ibuki seeing as I’m there. Late September I’m thinking of doing a big Ho-ou, Senjo, Kitadake, Aino, Shiomi trip over one of the long weekends. In between, nothing planned as such but hopefully I’ll get up to the hills for a couple of weekends. And then the snow starts, and things become interesting…!

I actually quite agree. The irony of calling skyscrapers evil whilst living (and at the time, writing and photographing) in one was not lost on me. Nor was calling *them* evil just seconds after referring to the firebombing during the war.

I wanted to set a discordant, off-center tone to the post to reflect the feelings we had as we watched that magnificent, but portentious, sunset that evening. Those firey reds and oranges really put me in mind of a giant conflagration happening somewhere beyond the hills..

Pollution though – definitely evil. No irony intended there.

Hope all’s well!

do you have any plans this summer? Julian just headed to Hokkaido with his dog Hana, and I’ll soon be following in his footsteps (in exactly a week). If all goes well, we’ll be meeting up on either Rishiri island or in Wakkanai.

Skyscrapers aren’t evil. Far better that people live close together near others since it means less energy needed to get around and heat and so on, and towers do that more effectively than anything else.

And that way you keep the quiet bits of land even quieter for those of us that like to get out there…

Earthquakes and tectonic plates are strange animals though, and sadly not very ameniable to statistical analysis except on a very macro level. The magma underneath changes direction, and the plates bucket and move and tension in different ways. It’s actually quite relevant for anyone who travels in the mountains, as the movement of magma over time will throw off the magnetic declination of any map (OK, you’d need to be using a pretty old map – but my father in law still uses his maps from the 70s and 80s, which may well now be off by a degree or so. I should check next time..). I wrote a short post about it a while ago:
http://i-cjw.com/blog/2007/05/21/magnetic-north/

The “overdue” Kanto earthquake used to worry the bejezus out of me, but after a while there’s only so much worrying you can do and your energy is better spent preparing your emergency kit. Otherwise known as a good excuse to buy more camping gear