It’s winter in Japan, the weather is cold, the sky is often grey, and sometimes, just to pitilessly finish us off, we’re blown around by the wind and drenched by the rain. It’s not the perfect season for a trip into the Japanese hinterlands!
But it’s also an opportunity to discover unique landscapes and I’ll try to prove it to you this year. This time, I’m taking you to the west coast, for a walk along Tottori’s dunes.
These dunes are composed of sediments from the nearest mountains, brought here by rivers and structured by the wind. So this sand contains more soil particles and is a lot darker than the Dune of Pyla in Arcachon Bay, France / back home in France.
The stretch of sand, constantly eroding, is also less extensive and the dunes far smaller (50 metres high against 110 metres for our national dune in Arcachon). You get me, I wouldn’t suggest the Tottori Dunes unless you live nearby or… maybe… if it’s snowing hard 🙂
I’m from Arcachon, and I’m (of course) used to the famous Dune of Pyla. Consequently, I didn’t expect to be astonished by Tottori’s. However, for the first time, I knew that I was finally going to walk on snow powdered dunes with the ocean in front of me. A dream close to impossible in my homeland.
What about you? Would you visit Tottori’s dunes? Or have you already had the luck to walk on the snow at Pyla?
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Woah! That’s crazy! I mean .. it was really cold when I visited, but seeing it covered in snow is kind of insane.
Thanks for sharing these awesome photos! 🙂
Thank you! I was actually waiting for this to happen very impatiently… and then when I could see the dune was covered with snow, I drove to it! (it happened kind of like that, also, I was in Osaka at that time). Now I am waiting for another kind of landscape to be covered by snow around Tokyo but not sure it will happen this year… Fingers crossed…
Wow, all the way from Osaka? Quite amazing, but you got awesome photos out of it, so totally worth it! ^___^
Was that a camel and surfer I saw in the photos?
The pictures of the dunes were nice, but for some reason the second one of the town really catches my eye.
Thank you for sharing your adventures with us.
You are welcome, my pleasure really 🙂 Yeah, a camel and a surfer… surrounding by snow. The setting is quite interesting isn’t it 🙂