Yoshino Mountain is located in Nara Prefecture, and it is often considered one of the best places in Japan to see cherry blossoms. It takes about three hours and multiple train connections to get there from Himeji, which means that if you leave early enough, it's day-trip doable. I went there last weekend, on the 11th of April. The temperature was warm, but the weather alternated between foggy and cloudy. The trails were quite muddy due to the rainy days all of the week prior, but the views were still stunning! The trees were in various stages of losing their blossoms, so with each gust of wind petals were knocked off and blown about, creating a snowy impression. I wish I could have seen it on a sunny day, with the blossoms at their peak!
I did my best to photograph the beautiful cherry-covered slopes during my hike, but the fog mutes the bright colors of the blossoms. New cherry leaves grow in with an orange-red color, which combined with the lingering pink and white blossoms created some very colorful hillsides. I bet the mountain is stunning in autumn as well! It's a bit out of the way to get to Yoshino, but it's definitely worth it!
Many of the remaining blossoms were covered in dew/rain drops, which made them twinkle when the sun occasionally appeared from behind the clouds.
One of the first slopes, overlooking the rope-way terminal (there were rope-ways and buses to get your way up the mountain sides).
The mountain trails themselves were steep, and it often felt like hiking through a jungle, until you'd crest a ridge and see the cherry trees stretching out in front of you.
The effects of the clouds below the mountains and between the cherries was pretty neat, if difficult to photograph properly.
I caught a momentary lull between tour groups and got a few photos of the empty trails. It was extremely crowded; inclement weather and no-longer-peak blossoms didn't deter the crowds of hikers from coming to Yoshino Mountain.
Occasionally I could get a view of the cherries below, which was neat! Look at all the different colors they are!
I don't know the name of this temple, but it was one of the major ones along the mountain. They had a big bonfire set up alongside it, which was lit by the time I made it to the top of the mountain.
As I was passing the temple, I encountered a procession of some kind. Tons of monks and priests, male and female, young and old, wore varying kinds of traditional clothing. I noticed that many of them had different kinds of animal hides wrapped around their backs. Some of the monks carried giant conch shells which they played music on; they'd alternate as one of the poor players would run out of breath. (You could find the shell-horns for sale at some of the shops, for about $800.00 each.)
There's a famous road down one of the slopes of Yoshino Mountain where many car commercials are filmed during the small cherry-blossom window. Many people were driving down the road, including many motorcycle-groups.
What few intact blossoms that were left were rather bedraggled and waterlogged, like this cluster above.
One of the views from the top. It took a few hours to get here, if you count my frequent photography stops. It was well worth the mud and crowds to make it to the top!
You can see a big cloud of smoke in the town below, coming from the big temple as they lit the bonfire (I assume).
All in all, Yoshino Mountain was a pretty cool experience. If you're visiting Japan in either autumn or spring, you should definitely take a day to visit here. It's an easy 90 minutes from Nara and Kyoto, so it'd be easy to combine them together in a multi-day trip. Be warned that the crowds are intense on the trails, and that the mud can be very thick. The hike itself is pretty easy, minus a few steep slopes here and there. It's a great way to experience the more untamed, rural side of Japan.
Comments
Post a Comment