Obuse roadtrip!

Today we went to Obuse. This town was recommend to me by my father who told me that there is a famous bonsai artist living in Obuse. So we took the train from Matsumoto station heading towards Nagano. Unfortunately we took the wrong one and had to pay a bit extra (we did get the extra comfy/fast train). Arriving at Nagano we took a local train heading in the general direction of Obuse. This train, however, stopped at a station called Suzaka. After asking the local train warden which train went to Obuse we finally arrived at our destination!

Obuse is even more 'いなか’ than Matsumoto.'いなか stands for inaka and means rural in Japanese. Matsumoto is somewhat inaka compared to Tokyo, but Obuse was definitely inaka. It is a quiet town which also looked relatively small. We walked to our destinations with ease.
The first challenge was to find the bonsai museum. The owner of this museum (which is basically his garden) doesn't like the commercial attention of websites such as FaceBook or other social media and as such there is no website where you can look up the location of the museum. The best advice I could find was to ask the locals for directions. Which I did at the tourist information centre near the town. They drew the route to the garden museum on a small map. After following the route we arrived at the garden.

The garden was full with bonsai, as was expected. We aren't big bonsai lovers, nor experts so we might have gone a bit fast through the exhibition. None the less we enjoyed the bonsai and took lots of pictures.

After this we went on to the Hokusai museum. A famous artist who also painted 'The great wave of Kanagawa'. It was a small museum and pictures were not allowed. So unfortunately I have no pictures, but I did buy some post cards with pictures on them.

After this we called it a day and went on our journey back to Matsumoto. I managed to get some nice pictures of the mountains when waiting at Obuse station.