I 💜 Wasting Ink → Diaries → These Walking Dreams → Day 22 (May 4, 2017)

Kamitsutsumi, Ōita → 🌃 Ōita City

Map of Ōita Prefecture with author’s route from Kamitsutsumi to Ōita City highlighted. 🗺 Open map in GaiaGPS →

A hornets’ nest on a wooden ceiling. 📍 Kamitsutsumi, Ōita

A landscape of low clouds above forested hills.

A green field partly flattened by rain.

The fresh leaves of a wisteria plant covered with drops of rain.

A bridge covered with white wisteria leads to a wooden rest house at the edge of a cedar forest. 📍 Imaichi, Ōita

A Japanese man in mechanic’s overalls stands by his yellow motorcycle in the rain, smoking a cigarette and typing into his phone.

The same man squats by his motorcycle, raising a fist and looking very happy, his cigarette sticking out of his mouth. 📍 Ōta, Ōita

All I heard was a muffled “PETEEEEEEER!!” and the Honda which had screamed past screeched to a stop and turned around. Behind the visor was a huge grin and Mr. Macha, the tempura master, smoking like a maniac, one of the tenkara fishermen from Ōita who had invited me for picnic five days, 130 kilometers, and a mountain range before. “It would be wonderful to go with you but it is an impossibility now,” he said, zipped up his waterproof Honda mechanic’s overalls, and rode back into the rain, into the mountains from where I came, and I laughed for minutes, and I walked to the sea.

The rear ends of two black Nissan Skyline GT-R’s.

A sign says “Bunny crossing” and shows one large and three small hares. 📍 Ōita City

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

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