Picnic at the beach

We had a nice day off together today so we headed out to the beach for lunch. We stopped at a local bakery for some sandwiches and buns and then headed out to the beach at Shingu, about 40 minutes by bike away. We sat down in the shade of some trees and enjoyed the sound of the sea and the view of the waves hitting the beach:
After that we walked along the beach for a while. We came across some sandy cliffs that we had seen last June. One of the cliffs had eroded quite a bit since then. This is what it looked like about 10 months ago:
And this is what the same spot looked like today:
A big chunk of it must have collapsed sometime over the winter.

Anyway, we just enjoyed some time in the sand:
One thing that kind of bothers me...no, make that 'really' bothers me... is the amount of garbage that gets washed up on the beaches around here. Some stretches get cleaned up by the locals but others do not. There was one spot we walked across today that was definitely not one which gets cleaned up as it was saturated with garbage. We noticed that quite a lot of it comes from Korea, including this piece of wood (not sure about where the old boot came from):
We had a couple of plastic bags with us and I filled them with as much garbage as I could find to bring with us and properly dispose of, but it didn't even make a scratch on how much there was. It is a shame because these are some otherwise really lovely stretches of coastline. Fortunately thanks to the efforts of some locals not everywhere is that bad, but some places are just horrible.

After that we just walked along the hills next to the coast, there was a nice trail:
And then we headed home.

Shingu

Ena and I went to Shingu today, the last town on the Nishitetsu Kaizuka railway line (though we biked instead of taking the train. Our trip into the countryside took us past Tachibana mountain, which we had climbed only a couple of days earlier:
Shingu has a nice long beach that stretches on for a good 10 kilometres or more. A large pine forest runs along the coast as well, we road through it on our way to the beach:

The beach was quite nice, with views of mountains in the background:
We walked along the beach for a while, beachcombing. After about half an hour we noticed a fire on the beach in the distance. I was kind of annoyed and we didn't want to go too close, but for whatever reason I set the zoom on my camera to the maximum and took a picture of it:
After I got home and was looking at the pictures I took, I zoomed in on the figure you can sort of see standing behind the fire. It is a completely naked man. He was too far away for us to actually see him. Further examination of the photo revealed a number of other nude figures in there which weren't visible at first. I'm not sure but we may have almost stumbled across a nudist colony of some sort.