Continuing on from my recent trip to Shirakawa-go, here's a report from my first day in the Hida area, in which I passed through Takayama and stayed in a smaller village called Hida-Furukawa. The trip was operated by Satoyama Experience.
A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have the chance to take part in a trip organised by Satoyama Experience to Hida-Furukawa in Gifu Prefecture. While I was in that neck of the woods I decided to take a short 1-hour hop to the small village named Shirakawago, famous in the world ever since its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
Now, some may say I'm a stick in the mud, but I've never considered myself the kind of man who gets excited at the thought of going fruit picking. Call me old fashioned, but that's just the way I was brought up. However, it's always good to try something, at least once in life, perhaps... And so it was that I found myself on a bus with a group of people, heading out of Tokyo on our way to rural Yamanashi Prefecture. After a short stop at a service station, we arrived at Miharashien and found ourselves surrounded by rolling fields with crooked trees growing in orderly lines.
Take a look at our photo gallery of a day of cycling in Hida-Furukawa, organised by Satoyama Cycling!