Solo Camping in the Japanese Mountains 🏕️🍂

Autumn arrived in Japan. It's one of the most magical seasons of the year, but to be honest with you I spent most of it behind the screen. So I decided to pack up my things and go camping high up in the Japanese mountains to welcome autumn underneath the red momiji leaves. I hope you enjoy. Hey everyone, I'm just packing my stuff right now to go to Osaka and pick up a car there And then I will go camping in the mountains of Okayama. It's my first time in a prefecture, so I'm super excited. So let's go. I just parked here on this little roadside because it was too beautiful to not look at. Wow, it's like paradise. The Japanese countryside is getting less and less populated and it feels quite surreal being in such a beautiful place with almost no one around. I'm always fascinated by how just a short car drive away life in the mountains is so different from the bustling energy of the city. After a three hour ride I arrived at a beautiful camping site with huts as well as tents embedded in a stunning valley with a mountain river running through it and the sun just setting over the treetops. It's so luxurious. I feel like Harry Potter. Hey everyone, I just checked into my tent and now I have to hurry a little bit because I booked a sauna. So yeah, I'm gonna enjoy a little bit of sauna and then afterwards dinner. So I'm very very excited. It's very nice to be in nature. Recently I've been so caught up in my thoughts and worries and putting myself under constant pressure. When I arrived here, I felt like I really needed this. Nature always brings everything into perspective and reminds me that I'm a part of something much bigger. It was so much colder than I expected in the mountains. The freezing air and the powerful sound of the waterfall brought me away from my thoughts into the present moment and I felt so alive. Hey everyone, I just came back from the sauna and I'm gonna heat up a little bit in the tent. Actually, I have a heater here. So it's not cold at all. Yeah, I'm just gonna get a little bit warm and then it's barbecue time. Returned to the campsite and looks like they've made the fire. It's very cold you guys, but still very very nice. I'm gonna go to this fire and warm up a little bit. And so my first day in the mountains of Okayama came to an end. The day felt so long and I was amazed on how much I did. Maybe because I didn't spend any minute of it in front of a screen. So with the sweet aftertaste of marshmallows in my mouth and a sea of bright stars above me, I wrote down the memories I was able to live. I had a quiet short night's sleep and woke up from the dry air in the tent. I decided to greet the mountains first thing in the morning before anyone else awakes. On this trip, I've been reflecting a lot on my dreams for this channel. It is to create get-togethers where we share, learn and deeply feel into our existence together. I'm really excited to partner up with Squarespace in today's video to take one more step towards that dream. Squarespace helps you to build websites for anything. Community spaces, products, events and more. With their new AI tools, it's faster and easier than ever to bring your vision to life. Thanks to Squarespace, I've created a space to share my work and connect with all of you. If you're ready to build your own, check the link in my description below and use my code ninisan for 10% off your first website or domain. Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. Ohayo everyone! I'm drinking a little cacao right now to make me warm. It's still very freezing here. But it's getting better and before I leave this beautiful place, I wanted to journal and I have one technique that I like to do before the new week starts and I would like to share it with you. As far as I know, this technique is called Wheel of Life. There are many ways you can draw this, but I like to put a dot in the middle and create some same length lines in all directions, which you then name with, for example, mental health, partnership, family or friends, work, physical health, etc. Then you look back on the past week and score yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how well you did in this field. After that, you connect all of it and the goal is to create a quite balanced circle. When there are dips, you can easily identify which areas you lack in at the moment and create little goals for yourself for the next week to improve in that area. For example, right now my focus is on myself and work a lot, so I didn't really have time to be social and meet my friends. So in the next week, I would like to start Ikebana classes, which I wanted to do for a long time and maybe meet some new people there as well. You can do this monthly or even yearly, but I like to do this weekly on Sunday to just check in and remind myself what I like to put my focus on the next week. I don't want this to pressure me in any way, but I noticed that days and weeks can go by so quickly and this really helps me to be more intentional with my life. I really wanted to visit Okayama City after leaving the mountains, but sadly the distance seemed a little too far for a day. So I decided to visit Himeji on my way home. Of course, I couldn't pass by the famous Himeji castle, but before I go there, I checked out a lovely little market that displayed and sold ceramics from all over Japan. Luckily, I didn't have much time because I'm sure I would have returned with a car full of ceramics home. It is quite rare to be able to enter castles in Japan. So I was very excited. The castle has seven floors in which each one I climbed, the views got more and more stunning. And I imagined how the view must have looked like hundreds of years ago when there were no tall buildings in sight. I'm still always so amazed by Japan's wildlife that exists so freely even in the city. So when I saw this tree full of white shirasagi just outside the castle, I couldn't believe my eyes. This castle is actually called shirasagi since it's all white. And somehow it felt like these birds were souls of samurai still protecting their castle. Thank you very much for joining me once again on an adventure. I hope this video brought you a little bit of peace. See you very soon. Goodbye.