This last Sunday we had plans to go out and do a canoe tour of the mangrove forest they have here in Amami. It was still hours from high tide so we decided to go for a drive in the meantime. I've been scoping out a few areas to take photographs of waterfalls but I've only been near them when it was dark out so I took advantage of this time to check them out. The first area I went to didn't turn out to be a waterfall at all, but a small damn. Scratched that one off the list...
On the way back up the path, I came across this small salamander type lizard. They have a bunch of different lizards like this in Amami but this is the only one with a cobalt blue tail.
After that we made out way over the mountains towards the south where we would be doing the canoe tour. As we made our way over, we came across a bunch of varieties of hibiscus. I'll admit, I was lazy and really didn't get out of the car to take these photos, but instead used my 55-200mm zoom lens and just opened the window and shot. None of these photos have been cropped.
Nikon D60, Nikkor 55-200mm f/4.0-5.6 @ 200mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 500 -- EXIF
Red Hibiscus With Many Petals
Nikon D60, Nikkor 55-200mm f/4.0-5.6 @ 120mm, 1/200 sec, f/4.8, ISO 200 -- EXIF
Not a Clue
(and my focus sucks!)
Amami also grows bananas, passion fruit, mangos, oranges, dragon fruit and lots of sugarcane but they are harvested during different times of the year. Later on during the winter, it will be time to harvest oranges. They have a couple of different varieties of oranges and they too aren't harvested at the same time. Is harvest the correct word to use to gather fruit off the trees? I'm not sure.
So those are some of the shots I took before we started our canoe tour last Sunday.
2 comments:
Hi Earnest: Jeffrey Friedl suggested I took a look at your flowery blog.
Although I've never been so far south in Japan as Amami, I did see the hibiscus (H. rosa-sinensis) in Yakushima, and it is pretty widely grown elsewhere, even in the UK as a greenhouse plant. Many varieties, hence the range of colours, but I think all derived from the same species.
The blue 'not-a-clue' looks like Duranta erecta (D. repens), Taiwan-rengyou; and the large violet flower is a member of the family Melastomaceae, perhaps Melastoma candidum, known as No-botan or Hanki-tabu in Okinawa, according to Walker's Flora of Okinawa and the southern Ryukyu Islands.
Looking forward to your canoeing photos: it is very interesting to me to see photography in the far south.
Peter,
Thanks for the help with the flowers I didn't know the names for. It's amazing to me that you can know so much about flowers.
I really enjoy looking at your photos on your website. They make me want to take a trip to Wales.
Again, thanks for the help.
Earnie
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Keep the language clean please. I have family that see this. Tell us what part of the world you're in.