Rikugien is an Edo Period "kaiyu-shiki teien" garden or a walking garden in which a person follows a path through the garden to enjoy carefully composed views that resemble entire landscapes. There are eighty-eight scenes recreated from well-known poems within the 21 acres of the garden. These recreations don't copy details as much as convey the spirit of the place.
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"therebychance" is a personal web site to park images, photographs, writing, etc., with no objectives for now. There’s a bias toward Hawaii and Japan because that’s where I have spent most of my life.
Clouds over Mauna Kea
I was rummaging through long-forgotten photos when I ran across this shot of Mauna Kea, the volcano in Hawaii that is the highest mountain in the world measured from its base in the sea. I shot this from a hotel on the Kona side of the Big Island.
clouds swirling around Mauna Kea, December 1996
When I was a child, I'd visited the Big Island of Hawaii and spent time at my grandfather's farm on the foothills on the rainy side of Mauna Kea. It was not unusual for the summit to be obscured by a low featureless ceiling of clouds or storm clouds blown in from the sea, but I'd never seen clouds swirling around Mauna Kea exactly in this manner.
Of course, Mauna Kea presents a different face from the west coast of the Big Island, clear in the morning with clouds building up in the afternoon and hanging low on the slopes often stretching out toward the sea. A friend told me that depending on the wind and other conditions, unusual cloud formations can sometimes be seen including lenticular formations. I had to look up the word, "lenticular," and learned that this described clouds that were high altitude formations forming perpendicular to wind direction and often resembled UFOs.
This got me curious, and after searching, I found this NASA photo of a lenticular cloud near Mauna Kea in 2003, and another one taken above Mauna Kea.
As much as I would have like to have seen lenticular clouds and always looked for them whenever I faced Mauna Kea, I've never seen Mauna Kea like this since then. But I like this photo as it reminds me a bit of the description of Laputa, the flying island in Swift's writings.
Note: Okay, the poor quality of the photo in this post comes from a scan done by Yodobashi Camera many years ago and is not even as good as a digital toy camera these days. If I can, I'd like to get a better quality scan even though the original photo is a color negative in the APS film format. I used an APS camera I had received as a gift then. (APS stands for the film-based Advanced Photo System introduced in 1996.)
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