Hey, Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud

For a few minutes this morning, cycling along the Tama and Asa rivers in western Tokyo was sublime as the sun started to rise and mists rising up from the water formed clouds.

There are a few periods in the year when this phenomenon occurs, usually in the autumn and spring when the water and air temperatures diverge to a large degree.

This year had, to me, seemed to be an archetypically Tokyo winter; the first in years.

It has been chilly, sunny and windy: all phenomena I associate with the coldest part of the year.

It hasn’t happened like that for the past few years, though, especially last year when the first quarter of the year was inordinately light.

Clouds arising over the river is not an unusual sight, but I don’t remember ever seeing it happen in January before.

I had been tempted a little earlier than when these shots were taken as I could have gotten a shot of the bike in the mist with a blazing red sunrise in the background. But I decided against trying to capture that image as cameras never reproduce sights as well as the human eye sees them. Where I stopped offered a far safer chance of taking a good photo.

It was, perhaps, the safest part of the journey, as my vision was also clouded, this time because of the failure of the battery on my cheap bike light, which gave up two-thirds of the way through the journey.