Hiking north of Town

I have discovered a new hobby that goes with motorcycling - hiking! I often saw these wonderful looking trails in the mountains so today I decided to discover one of them. Here below I'm heading out of town and saw some amazingly steep hills with green tea planted on them. Behind the VStrom you can see a sort of cable car used to transport equipment up and green tea down.

I took a different road today. I'm always looking for new roads. This one was lovely.

Here you can see the road I'm going to take down below. This road is just north of town!

Here I'm starting up the hiking trail. There were lots of pretty mossy covered bridges like this at the beginning.

Some very pretty areas with mountain streams on both sides and then the trail started going up, up and way way up.

Here's a shot along an upper ridge with the creeks on each side way down below. I had to stop many times to catch my breath.

At the top when I met the road I decided that was enough for today and so I walked down the road back to the bike. Here is one switchback I encountered.

After getting back to the bike of course I had to ride up the road and found this temple at the top. Next time I'm parking here and hiking further up to the peak.

I stopped at this overlook where I'd taken a photo of the large wisteria and waterfall last week, but today it was past bloom.

Here's the shot I got last week with full bloom. This image is 1280 by 1024 and suitable for desktop wallpaper, enjoy!