One-Day Trip to Chihaya-akasaka Village

A sketch from the restaurant Santoka in Chihaya-akasaka Village. The building at the upper left is the residence of the owner of the restaurant. On the right, the side of the roofed, white gate of the residence is seen.

Yesterday (July 2, Saturday) my wife and I joined the one-day group trip organized by a travel agency. We got on a bus in front of the JR Ten'noji Station. The number of the group members was 35. We first visited Enmeiji Temple in Kawachi-nagano. There is a lotus pond in the garden of the temple, where we saw no flowers but some buds. It is a good place to visit in autumn, because there are many maple trees, among which the largest is about one thousand years old. That one has the name yubae-no-kaede (maple beautiful in the evening sun).

Then we went to Chihaya-akasaka Village. This is an only single village in Osaka Prefecture. The destination of our trip was the restaurant Santoka [1] at the foot of a mountain. The owner of the restaurant and his families has been living there since the days of their ancestors, who made a living by forestry. Now the part of the land around the restaurant is one of the most famous spots to see rhododendrons and hydrangeas. After having a fancy dish for lunch, we walked along the mountain roads to look at flowers of hydrangeas and other plants.

It had been raining rather hard until we finished lunch. In the afternoon, the rain became less hard, so that we could enjoy walking rather comfortably by breathing cool air of a forest. I did not brought with me tools for sketching. However, I made the sketch shown above after lunch by the use of a pencil and a sheet of pocket paper, on which sweet stuff had been served together with a cup of Japanese tea. I completed the sketch with a pen and color pencils after coming back home.

1. Web site, Santoka (in Japanese).