Here’s the only photo taken on my hiking trip that never was – taken at the bus stop outside Kofu Station at 4am. It was pouring, so Hayashi-san and I went back to the business hotel with a few beers to commiserate. What I didn’t manage to capture with my camera was the thunderstorm. The lightning lit up the night, and there was no way I was going to hike up a 2,700 metre mountain in that kind of weather! So we were deterred from heading out before the bus even arrived.
The Japanese Meterological Agency’s rainfall radar has been showing a lot of purple and red spots recently, and there was more in Tokyo last night. There’s been some really intense rainfall, including some places on Thursday and Friday last week that managed to receive over 100mm in an hour or so.
A big thunderstorm at 4 o’clock in the morning, combined with pictures of flash flooding on TV, makes it easy to call off a hiking trip. So Hayashi-san and I bypassed hiking bit and went straight to the obligatory after-hiking onsen, a few train stations up the line.
The weather the next day looked OK down in the valley. I couldn’t get much of a clear shot of the mountains without buildings in the way, but as you can see from the overpass at Isawa Onsen Station, the hills are clouded in, and the higher peaks are not visible in the distance. That thunderstorm might have passed through, but I still think it was a good call not to go.
