Day trip to Kamikochi by local trains and bike

This time I didn't feel tough to go 1000 meter up to the destination, except for the last very steep Kama Tunnel (釜トンネル; 1310m 10.9%).
Kamikochi was nicer than expected. I wanted to stay one night just listening to the sound of the stream without thinking about daily life. Water of Azusa river was clear and yet still, because of its flat land form at 1500 meters above sea level. I think it's very noticeable characteristic which realize this unique scenery.
Taking the previous bitter experience of the way back from Oze last time into consideration, I left the site a bit earlier. I got soon stuck in a traffic jam. I thought it's because of the cars of the leisure visitors going back home. I was very worried about missing the last train from Matsumoto. After a while I saw police treating a car crushed on a mountain side. After passing the accident site, I could go smoothly down the mountains. I biked as hard as possible. It was just 6 minutes before when arrived at Matsumoto station. I had to pack my bike so quickly.
In fact I didn't learn so much from the previous lesson. Next time, I swear I should leave well before the train departure time.

Midono Dam (水殿ダム)

Kappa Bridge (河童橋)

Lunch at Kamikochi Alpine Hotel

Took a bath at Kamikochi Onsen Hotel

Kamikochi Imperial Hotel

Today's best photo!

Bare trees reflected on water surface

Monkey in bush

Taisho Pond (大正池)

Azusa River (梓川)

Good bye, Kamikochi

This time, my new challenge was to only depend on iPhone 4, which I bought this month, for confirming a train time table, gathering the site info, taking photos, checking the current location in a map, and so on. It was successful overall, except for the quality of camera; the lens cannot collect so much light that the green was not saturated, and the speed of loading and showing a downloaded PDF sightseeing map in iBooks; it could show the buffered image when launching the application.