Camped at Mount Asama

I went camping at Asama-en Auto Campground.

As far as I can remember, this was my first time camping since childhood.

We departed from Saitama by car. At first, the countryside scenery like this continued,

but after about 2 hours, we were in the mountains.

As expected of Karuizawa. The trees are orderly, and you can feel the attention to detail in creating the landscape.

Shiraito Falls. It’s small for a waterfall, but it was full of nature and felt refreshing.

In front of the campground, there was a volcano museum.

It’s a place where you can learn about Mount Asama, which is a volcano, but there’s also an emergency food restaurant where, as the name suggests, you can eat emergency food, and there are nature walking trails.

The nature walking trails had extremely beautiful scenery.

I took a ton of photos, but they were all ruined because there was dust on my camera. It was a good learning experience.

For some reason, they were also selling bonsai. And at quite reasonable prices too.

The campground.

Interestingly, groups with more elaborate camping gear tend to take more prominent spots, which naturally improves the overall appearance of the campground.

Since June is the perfect camping season, almost all spots were taken.

The campground was filled with the sounds of frogs croaking and motorcycles drifting.

Asama-en is also known as a holy land for motorcycle riders. Though you can’t see them from the campground, you could tell from the sounds that quite a few people were racing motorcycles during the day.

My first time smoking food.

Starting the fire was difficult, but things like sausages and cheese are easy to smoke.

Curry. This was probably my first time cooking rice in a mess tin since elementary school. Back then, I couldn’t do it well and have memories of struggling to chew hard rice with uncooked cores.

This time I was nervous going in without practice, but it was easy to make since the water amount and the color when cooked were not much different from using a rice cooker.

Heineken.

According to the person who took me camping this time, the real charm of camping starts after sunset.

I completely agreed. Conversations around the campfire were nice, and if you went a little away from the campground, it was very quiet and the stars were beautiful.

Before leaving, I tried a hot air balloon ride (3000 yen per ride).

I’m not good with heights so I couldn’t keep my eyes open at all, but watching the balloon rise from below was a good experience.