Kawazuzakura
Dear Sharon,
Greetings from Kawazu Cherry Blossom Festival 2014! In your comment, you asked me to show you more of this part of the trip, so here’s a picture of a very old tree outside a shrine. The sign tells you about the tree – hope you can read it!
Anyway you can also see the shrine and some small farms which grow carnations and other stuff and you can visit the carnation farm during the day if you want or you can walk along the river and soak your feet in the foot onsens instead. Or play with river rocks.
That’s it for now, hope everyone’s well, and don’t forget the fridge door tends to swing outwards unless you close it really properly, A’s worried you’ll forget that. Miss you!
Love,
Everyone
.
.
Dear Sharon,
Straight after I popped that last one in the post I saw this one, and I thought hey yeah, you’d probably like to know what we’ve been eating. So would we! Hah hah. No seriously, if you can tell us what that dark green stuff is that’d be great. Don’t tell P his “lollipop” is a sausage, though, it’d spoil the magic.
Probably our favourite so far is the weird copper apparatus thing you can see in the top left on the front of this postcard. They’re pressure-cooking chestnuts. I thought they were tasty, but P was mainly into them for the steampunk vibe. We also ate pork(?) buns, sweet potato wedges, fresh and candied fruit (we would have had chocolate-dipped bananas with hundreds and thousands but I managed to find something interesting to point at in the other direction every time we saw a stall with them), salted fish and I can’t remember what else. I guess they have to drink beer, too, for the scarecrows. The drawbacks of farming!
Oh and there was this weird cherry blossom gel paste stuff which we bought heaps of and it was good because P gave it away to some people in a waiting room and then they kept us a seat on the train later. It’s sweet but only a little bit.
Love,
Everyone.
.
.
Dear Sharon,
It pains me
To realise I for-
-got these things.
Love,
Everyone
.
Extra and Related:
The Kawazu Cherry Blossom Festival is held annually from mid-February to mid-March, and is one of the earliest opportunities to view cherry blossoms in Honshu.
The festival was generally stroller-friendly. There were also plenty of porta-loos, but we didn’t see any baby change areas, so you might have to work with what you’ve got (stroller/change mat on ground/etc).
There’s no problem whatsoever with navigation. Just follow the cherry trees! If you want more direction, festival maps are available at the train station or online via the official Kawazu Onsen visitor’s website (although note that the waterfalls are a lot further by bus than it looks at first glance). If you want less direction, feel free to wander at random – it’s a nice, small village.
Although the main market area was crowded, it was easy to escape to the quiet of the shrine and other parts of the village and surrounds.
Trees are lit after dark, which we were totally going to hang around for until we got tired and damp and cold. You can view day and night pictures at the official Kawazu Onsen visitor’s website.
Cherry blossom season is now in full swing across Honshu. Check the forecast here and view local blossom varieties online at, for example, Japan Australia (Gifu) or Shizuoka Pictures (Shizuoka City).
Learn how we ended up at the Kawazu Cherry Blossom Festival as part of our family holiday around Japan. We stayed in nearby Rendaiji, just two stops by train away from Kawazu.
This post appeared first at Journeys of the Fabulist and was shared as part of Friday Postcards at Walking On Travels.
The cherry blossoms look really nice!!! worth traveling across the globe for…
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They were definitely beautiful.
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Dear everyone,
Thanks so much for thinking of me and the pretty postcards. The cherry blossoms look stunning.
I’m not sure about the pressure cooked chestnuts, although they do sound interesting. Cherry blossom gel sounds a bit scary. I wish you had given me the fridge advice before I left it open overnight. Oh well.
Wish I was there!
Sharon
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Dear Sharon,
Hahaha!
Love,
Everyone 🙂
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Love the montage of cherry blossoms so pink and gorgeous!
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Thanks! Although once again I’ll give credit to Kawazu for planting that many trees all out together like that. When you’re there, you really feel like you’re walking through that montage. Just cherry blossoms at every angle.
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what a beautiful and wonderful pink series! so great to see them all together like that!
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And it’s not just the way I’ve arranged the photos. Alright, it is a little bit, but they really have packed the trees all together along the main cherry blossom route as well, so you get much the same impression in real life.
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Amazing pictures! We were in Japan in February 2010, which was a bit too early for cherry blossom season. Finally got to see some in the Korean town of Gyeongju. They are really magical 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
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Ah, Korea! What time do they bloom there?
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March or April, depending on the weather patterns. We were there from April 2009 – April 2010. They had bloomed early in 2009, so we didn’t get a chance to see them then. And they bloomed late when we left! Luckily, we got in a weekend in the south and managed to see them before we flew back to the States. 🙂
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Ha! Typical that they would be early for your arrival and late for your departure! But at least you did see them. Korea would be an interesting place to spend a year.
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Ports-loos. That sounds almost as bad as a port-a-potty, which is the most foul place in the universe. Ports-loos. Obviously I need to travel outside this country. (It took the idea of a ports-loo to make me get my sluggish self to a travel agent.)
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Oh, whoops, that’s a bit of a typo. It should be porta-loo! And yes, usually they are foul, but these ones were amongst the cleanest and most pleasant I’ve seen (they were better than the train station, which also wasn’t bad for a train station).
Not sure I’d travel just to see the porta-loos, though 🙂 .
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Sausage lollipop!? Love it! I like the letter style you wrote in…your holiday still looks fabulous! We fly back to Itaky tomorrow so I’ll be back soon 🙂
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Exactly. Sausage lollipop.
Glad you liked reading the letters, and thought it was pretty true to form that they arrived nearly a month after the event itself and a good couple of weeks after our return home. Just like a real postcard!
Can’t wait to hear all about your goings-on. It’s been quieter without you (that’s meant in a good way).
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These trees are so lovely — and now the whole place is!! Thanks for sharing this with us!
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It was really very pretty. The festival seems to be a big deal for what is a pretty small village, and when you see the number of trees around the place you understand how that came to be.
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Otherworldly! I adore the cherry blossom pics.
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Thanks! They’re not all mine – some come courtesy of my mother in law. Also, I give a lot of credit to the gorgeous blossoms – I think it’s hard to take a bad photo.
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Gorgeous cherry blossoms – loved hearing about the food too! Mind blowing how different it all is. What an experience!
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We basically ate our way around the festival, which seemed to be the idea! No worries about starving, that’s for sure. I’m kicking myself I didn’t take a picture of the enormous strawberries we bought – they were pretty tasty as well and would have made a great splash of colour on the postcard!
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I love the pictures! You truly did take post card quality photos. I’m glad you actually got to see the cherry blossoms!
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I can’t claim they’re all mine – some are my mother in law’s. I got to pick from a broader range than usual and then I fiddled with them a bit afterwards to touch them up, too. So I’ll probably hold off quitting my job to become a postcard photographer, even though that sounds like a pretty cool job in some ways.
Now I’m wondering who takes the shots they use on postcards? How does a photographer get that gig, I wonder?
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I wonder too. I am so far from taking any photos that are postcard worthy,
But it does sound like a fun job.
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Such beautiful blossoms and pinks. I love the question mark after we ate pork? Have to love unidentifiable meat. 🙂
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To be fair, the guy did try to identify the filings for us, but the only one he could translate was “tuna”. So I’m sure they were identifiable in some language, and that’s good enough for me and better than I’ve accepted at certain points in the past. (It doesn’t pay to be fussy when travelling, does it?)
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I ate Haggis two days ago so obviously I am with your line I thinking Bronwyn. You just have to embrace it all and relax and hope for the best 🙂
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I do feel for those with allergies or religious restrictions when travelling. And for parents of fussy eaters.
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Yes then it becomes very challenging.
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We eat a lot more conservatively with the kids on holiday. Ours aren’t fussy, but P gets fussy as soon as he gets to our destination. Luckily everywhere seems to have some form of bread.
We had an advertisement in Australia at one point and these two backpackers are eating something in some exotic location and they ask their host (using mimes and gestures) what they’re eating. The host takes a stick and starts to draw an animal. After thirty seconds they say, “Oh! It’s lamb?” Then the guy draws the animal’s testicles and taps them with his stick.
Some people probably watched the ad and decided they should be more careful what they eat when travelling. Others decided they should stop asking.
If the kids ask me, it’s “chicken”.
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The cherry blossoms are lovely!
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Thanks! They really were. There’s a reason it’s such a big deal to do and see them. It was great just wandering around and snacking from the market stalls, too.
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