80s Sax & lonely roads
Last weekend I spent a little time taking a small excursion to a temple with some friends. Now this is not particularly exciting in itself but it did mean that I got to see, by the side of the road, a man who had parked up next to a colossal dam, and was absolutely going to town on his saxophone. I don’t know how hard he was rocking as we went past quite quickly, but I’d wager it was pretty hard. He looked like he was practicing to be in a music video; the kind of video where there are helicopters that swoop down and give panning shots of everything, including things like dams, and people playing saxophone on them. Think about it; name a decent 80s song that doesn’t include gratuitous use of a sax solo. I’d say around 30% of Duran Duran’s best bits were all sax. Sadly on our return about 5 hours later he had gone. But I think it was probably just to buy a fresh packet of reeds in order to keep jamming.
The temple we went to was a very attractive standard sort of affair, but by far my favourite part was the little hike we took. We stumbled upon to a mountainside road that had been abandoned and left for dead by the rest of Japanese society. There obviously came a time 10 or 20 years ago where they felt that the road was just too dangerous to use anymore and said ‘fuck it, let’s just build another one somewhere else’. It looks like it has been discarded so casually with road signs, tarmac, and barriers all still nonchalantly hanging around waiting for some cars to come again. As sketchy as some parts felt, it led us down to a spectacular river, and it was nice to go somewhere without the hordes of tourists. It has also tickled my interest as I’ve always thought urban exploring looked pretty cool, so I may see what I can find in Japan.
Here is the temple we went to see. Those Japanese people are not really far away, that’s just the size Japanese people are.
This is on the disused road we wandered along. It’s pretty hard to believe that this is a tarmacked mountain road with all of the leaves covering the ground, but the road signs tell a different story. Although this is not a Japanese person, again, they are not really far away, they are just that small
Road safety barrier now unemployed, and nowhere to go
This is the river that lay next to the overgrown road we walked down :-)
