A hearty (if somewhat belated) hello to all of our readers around the world!
With lustrous mounds of snow now covering just about every inch of Nagano, we can safely say winter ins nowhere its end. A glance at the calendar offers cause for cheer however. For one thing, the arrival of Valentine’s Day means that your humble correspondent will soon be showered with chocolate from the ladies in his life. More importantly, we’re now three months into the five month off season that sees Kamikochi closed to the public. Three months down, two to go!
As these evocative photos from the Five Sense blog show, winter in Kamikochi is beautifully tranquil:
As you can see in this short excerpt from an online guided tour taken just yesterday, there’s ne’er a soul to be seen about the place these days.
For those of us lucky enough to be based in Japan, visiting Kamikochi will be as easy as travelling to the park by the usual means any time after it reopens to the public on April 17th. For others, it may still be difficult to travel to Japan. With the ongoing (read: never ending) COVID crisis showing now signs of ending, it remains unclean when Japan will relax its tight restrictions on entering the country. Naturally, we remain hopeful for more positive developments by this summer.
That’s all for now. We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief peak inside the gate to the Northern Alps. Till next time, keep warm and stay safe!
Source of Information:
Nature Guide Five Sense, Kamikochi blog: https://fivesense.guide/blog/today/32593/