Nakasendo - 中山道 in Japanese - is a famous road stretching between Tokyo and Kyoto. Some people walk the whole thing, but we were limited to a day, so we picked a stretch between two particular areas, a three or four hour walk in all. It's a famous road, but I hadn't walked any of it yet, so this was going to be interesting. It would also give the 28-300 a good workout, because when you travel you don't want to spend every minute changing lenses because you want a wide angle shot and you have a telephoto lens on (not to mention the inconvenience it causes to your travel partner).

I took a LOT of pictures and this is going to be divided up into at least three parts. After editing, I had 99 shots left and I'm quite happy with most of them, so it's going to be a fun exercise in choosing which ones to put up here (but I will put all, or nearly all of them in the "Nakasendo" gallery).

The first shot I took more or less as soon as we got off the bus. There was a view over the fields and a solitary individual working in them. For some reason the line "We plow the fields and scatter" came to mind.

The section of the road which we walked started at Magome (馬籠) and involved a fairly steep hike up a winding road. The upside of this was you only had to look behind you to get some pretty nice views.

The steep winding road itself:

A short gap break in the road gave rise to this view. First horizontally:

and vertically:

This area was also home to some seriously spectacular colours

Further down the road...

Finally for this part of the entry, some more colourful scenes:

That's it for this part: the next part will be somewhat different...where the extremes of light and shade fight for my sensor's attention (hint: I needed HDR an awful lot) and lots of trees and wooded paths.

Thanks for looking, the next part will be up in a few days.