Mark Johnston Photography

13 June 2010: (mostly) green

Summer on the Izu Peninsula is a green season.

The air is wet. And down in the city it's the kind of day where, after a short walk to the bank or the grocery store, you need to take another shower and put on a fresh change of clothes. The early summer crowds on the beach are immersing themselves in the sea - or sitting in the shade of one of the temporary beach huts drinking beer.

But up here, a couple hundred meters further above sea level, although it is still very humid - it is cool. Cool because it's further up the hill. Cool beneath the shade of the beechwood and maple trees. Sometimes startlingly so when, crossing a valley bottom, you get bathed by the stream-cooled air.

And it's quiet too, except for the occasional low drone of a car snaking its way cautiously towards old Amagi tunnel on the gravel road above. Or the distant roar of a truck on the two-line highway that runs between Kawazu and Shuzenji.

Quiet enough to hear birds and squirrels.

And quiet enough to discern the many voices of the gurgling stream: the tinkling fast drip of a rivulet dropping down the hillside, to the deep gong of a submerged rock, still uncertain of its place, being rocked back and forth by the action of the water, and the swishing midrange of the many cascades between the boulders.

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This page last modified: 21 August 2010.