Country rambles

After our hike, Crazy Aya and I wandered around a charming village in Sandankyo that consisted of shops selling local produce and traditional-style Japanese farmhouses with their burgeoning vegetable and fruit gardens. Firstly we meandered through the stalls and took refreshments of hot tea, sliced persimmons and charcoaled fish-on-sticks. Then we rambled uphill amongst the farms. A cat lapped at a bowl of milk by the tatami-matted veranda of a farmhouse. Persimmons, strung in neat rows like pegged laundery, dried and curled in the sun on lines zigzagging housefronts, or ladened the trees with their bulging orangeness. Bunches of red chillis were left like forgotten bouquets on the porches. A slim blue damselfly skimmed my cheek as it looped the loop and alighted on a nearby branch. Bonneted women, with baskets on their backs, bent over in a permanent stoop as they reaped vegetables from their gardens. The wayside was cheerful with scattered wildflowers: purple, mauve and red. A fine hawk, regal and bronze, watched us sternly from a telegraph pole. Ah, what a quaint picture is the Japanese countryside!