Mountain Bounty

 

Day 9 of my walk along the Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage, and I am walking through some remote mountain country I had no been to before.

It's early May, so plenty of flowers..... also industrial waste..... there is a lot of abandoned construction company sites filled with scaffolding and such.... also plenty of dumped vehicles...... but a few times I've seen industrial drums rusting.....

Snakes have been out and about for months already..... not sure what species this guy is, but its not a poisonous mamushi...... wouldnt bother me if it was.....

This gentleman was tending his hives. Don' t remember seeing many hives in Japan, but the honey must come from somewhere..... I suspect most not from Japan....

This couple have been harvesting fuki, a wild plant eaten quite a bit.... I believe it is called butterbur... pieces of the stem re often found in bentos...

The ubiquitous roadside shrine.... with fresh flowers.....

The bamboo shoot harvest was a couple of weeks ago around my village, but I guess up here in the mountains it is a few weeks later..... when trimmed, this barrowload will fetch a pretty penny from city folk.

I start to drop down into the area around Mito Onsen... where a small, civic matsuri is taking place.... the first kagura dances are ritual and not masked, but I decide not to wait around for the later dances....

The previous post in this series was on two interesting shrines I visited earlier in the day.

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