urbex

Holland has mountains, and all people have died from a horrible virus a couple of years ago, leaving behind an abandoned country!

Today I cycled to Nagasaki city. In the morning I passed by the Huis Ten Bosch Dutch theme park fairly early, and it was still closed. I took a couple of photos and moved on. I cycled for at least an hour towards the south when suddenly I saw this in the distance:

That's weird

More Dutch buildings? That's strange. The only Dutch-related area in Japan that I knew of was the Huis Ten Bosch theme park. I of course could not resist a little investigation. Finding the entrance alone was difficult enough as there were not a lot of signs, and I ended up climbing a hill with some farmland on top. Going down on the other side of the hill I suddenly found myself in an abandoned Dutch village.

Foliage overgrowth

More foliage

Then I noticed a sign:

"Holland Village"

and it all clicked into place. Yesterday at Huis Ten Bosch, while talking to the funny Dutch guy with all the strange bicycles, he told me he'd been doing his job for as long as HTB existed, and even before that at its predecessor, Holland Village! This place is the predecessor of Huis Ten Bosch and used to be a Dutch-themed theme park! Now it's completely abandoned and there's nobody there! I love exploring abandoned places, so suddenly finding an abandoned theme park at the side of the road is like discovering gold! I took my time and went around taking a lot of photos. I tried to find information on this place but couldn't find much more than this Japanese wiki page.

I like this

Abandoned escalators captivate me

"Escalators don't break. They just temporarily turn into stairs"

It's weird enough to find a Dutch village in Japan, it's even weirder to find it abandoned and looking like something from a post-apocalyptic movie.

Nobody home

Future City

Even this place was abandoned

Disaster struck

I then came across a tiny little storehouse.

Loeki de Leeuw

I'm not exactly sure when this park was abandoned. The foliage growth, escalators and signs made me think that it couldn't have been more than ten years ago. But this storehouse uses some logo's that I've only ever seen in old Holland when I was little, maybe twenty years ago. I really can't tell.

Morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I checked to see if the door was unlocked. It was. I slowly opened the door, and as I did so a medium-sized (that's very-large-sized for Dutch standards!) spider crawled away from me. When I entered I saw this:

Boo

The store was completely empty, except for two of these dolls, slightly mutilated. There was nothing on the shelves, which was too bad, because I was kind of hoping to find a souvenir thingie from 20 years ago. No such luck. In the middle of the store there was a staircase left unfolded that lead to the attic. Thinking "oh well", I climbed the stairs and peeked my head up into the attic, and then got the shit scared out of me by a gigantic spider.

GAAH

By Dutch standards, this spider is the size of a small moon. It was far enough away, but considering that I couldn't see anything as I was climbing the stairs, I consider myself lucky that it was far away and didn't jump on my head. o_0

Ghost town

Abandoning my quest for souvenirs I returned to my bicycle and found my way back to the main road. I'm very happy with today's find. You can find the rest of the pictures here on Picasa. Note that I used my S90 compact camera today, which does focus and expose properly, unlike my 50D+18-200mm.

I'm in Nagasaki now, at a park in the port area, sitting under a tree, relaxing. I'm taking a forced break tomorrow. Why this break is forced I will tell you the day after tomorrow, when I will hopefully have another nice story to tell :)

Bon appetit!

This weekend was exactly what I needed to feel right back home here in Japan. A common-room party the likes of which we have not seen for quite some time. Even though the nice room was taken by Japanese people, the relocation of our fruit party to the first floor did not turn out bad at all, because we could use the common kitchen to make our fruit dishes presentable. I made a crazy amount of pictures, but since the weekend was quite busy I will have to post some later, so have some patience.

The party lasted until quite late, so I spent most of the Saturday sleeping, after which I watched an interesting movie about China during WW2 with a couple of friends. The movie is called Lust, Passion, and is a recommended watch for anyone remotely interested in China. Apparently some of the sex scenes in the movie were too shocking for mainland China, so they had to censor parts of it..

Sunday we departed on our trip in search of an abandoned theme park. After doing some extensive research online we found a brilliant website about urban exploration, which contained links to abandoned places in countries all over the world, including Japan. This site is a must-see for every photographer reading this blog, and I guarantee that it's very interesting for anyone who is curious about the topic. I'm actually wondering about whether or not to post this here, since technically I guess it's illegal to enter someone else's property. Therefore I present you the following disclaimer: everything in this post below this line is completely made up and fictional, and it never happened in real life :D

The theme park turned out to be more abandoned than I thought, and indeed I was too late to find anything of interest. All the rides and attractions had been demolished and removed already, and all that remained were a restaurant, the remains of a swimming pool and some toilet buildings. It was fun to explore the area and figure out what each part of the park was used for, and even though most of the park was a bit of a disappointment, the restaurant turned out to be a golden find. There was so much interesting stuff there, I found it hard to leave when the sun started to set. In the end I tried to leave the place in exactly the same state as it was in when I found it. It was quite an interesting experience, and I am definitely looking for new opportunities to find cool abandoned places a bit closer to home, maybe on a random bike trip some weekends later.

That evening I met up with some friends and we ended up in a very nice onsen (hot spring) hotel in Kinugawa, near Nikko. The next day we took a nice relaxing train ride all the way to Ibaraki-ken, to visit some countryside town to look at pottery. Apparently the town was famous for it's hand-made pottery, and it even offered people to make it themselves. Even though I didn't make anything myself I still had fun taking pictures of my friends making the pots. The scenery during the train ride was wonderful too, so all in all I really enjoyed myself this weekend ^_^.

I took a quick look at all the pictures I made this weekend, and I'm really amazed at the results of compared to my Europe trip (only ) a week ago. The photo's made in Japan seem to come out a lot better than the ones I made in Europe. I'm guessing this happens for two reasons. One: the weather in Japan is just better than in Europe, so the lighting is better, and I get more chances to make a good picture. Two: I'm just more interested in Japan than Europe, so I'm more motivated to look for a better picture.

The flash is amazing! I carried it with me for the trip, and in the abandoned restaurant it proved very useful indeed, lighting places that would otherwise be time-consuming or impossible to photograph, requiring either a tripod or a lot of patience and luck. The flash just makes clean, good pictures. I'm usually bouncing it against the ceiling because the effect of a direct flash is usually way too strong to produce a nice picture. The only complaint I have about it is that it makes the pictures look a bit too nice. The colors look very warm and the place looks way less creepy in the picture than it looked in real life. That will have to be toned down a bit by Photoshop before I publish some of them, I guess.

My opinion about my lenses keeps on changing too. I'm rediscovering the 17-85mm lens, which, even though it's degrading more and more (it's getting floppier and the focus still has some problems) produces very good results during day and night. At night the stabilization works way better than I previously thought, and it has the perfect range to use with the flash.

The 28mm 1.8 disappoints me a bit. I was expecting a lot from this lens during night scenes, like streets or statues, just doing random photographing in low-light conditions. But it seems that the pictures at f/1.8 are equally as blurry as my 17-85mm at 28mm - f/4.5 with IS enabled. And in that case there's really no point to use the 28mm in dark conditions, so I only use it to make close-up shots of things where the background is nicely blurred, and that doesn't happen too often during my trips.

I didn't use the 10-22mm! This must have been the first time ever that I didn't use it during a trip. I always used it for every trip I took since I bought it. This trip there was only one time I wanted to use the ultra-ultra-wide angle lens, and that was for a huge statue of Kannon, during sunset. In the end I decided to use the 17-85mm since it had IS and I didn't really need a much wider angle.. :S

Finally, the 70-300mm is by far the best lens I've got. So many pictures are superbly sharp, and the colors are excellent. For some reason it's easy to distinguish the superior quality of the photo's made by the 70-300mm compared to all my other lenses. The sharpness is just so much better. It makes me want to consider getting a better mid-range zoom lens as well, since it's quite noticeable which photo's came from the 17-85mm and which came from the 70-300mm. And that's not a good thing for the 17-85mm...

The colorful wolf

Meanwhile, in another parallel universe(!)

A proper crazy weekend