okiguro

okiguro3, originally uploaded by vibromama.

The Nippo coast will never be very populated. The mountains drop too steeply into the sea and while the inlets have small villages clinging on, the roads traversing these are so circuitous one can barely make faster progress on land than on the sea. Most of the promontories are road-less and deserted. And so it was we found the perfect place to camp for the night: a beach not exposed to the sea swell, with dark gray coarse sand that did not stick to everything wet, and a view to the north-east of the islands and coasts we were to traverse the next day. Investigating above the beach we found stone walls separating flattened places (ideal for camping) - some time ago, evidently even this remote place had been thoroughly cultivated. The unforgiving Nature and perhaps even more so, the government’s tyrannical taxation schemes of the past had made it so. The effort that must have been involved to grow some food in this remote thicket, before the convenience of mechanization, was hard to imagine. Now the descendants of the tough folk that had once transformed this land work 16-hour days in some office or factory, while the terrace walls behind this beach slowly topple over and overgrow with weeds.