Abandoned Kansai

Quarries tend to be the duller, more boring cousins of mines – not this one though! The Abandoned Vehicle Quarry had some really nice surprises waiting in the shadows…

In all honesty, on GoogleMaps the Abandoned Vehicle Quarry was little more than a yellowish spot surrounded by lush green in quite a mountainous part of Japan. I wasn’t even sure if the blurry area really was a quarry or maybe some kind of grove… or a landslide. But I was in the area for other locations, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to check it out. Fortunately the original find did not only turn out to be indeed a quarry, it turned out to be quarry with left behind machinery and vehicles! (Unlike the previously explored *Asuka Quarry*, which was kinda nice, but also kind of boring…)
At first sight the Abandoned Vehicle Quarry wasn’t that spectacular – a slightly dilapidated road leading up a steep mountain to a party overgrown wound carved into a mountain. Then I spotted a large piece of machinery, that once most likely was used to load trucks with whatever kind of stone they were “harvesting” here. Next to it some metal pieces that looked like oversized shotgun shells; at least to a weapons noob like me. Hidden in the shadow was a large abandoned bus, once used to transport all the workers up the mountain – probably from the nearest town to the quarry as there surely wasn’t enough space for a large parking lot. A fascinating piece, especially since it was partly swallowed by a landslide or two, making it nearly impossible to even guess how it got there. Further up the hill the separately roped off quarry itself, as unspectacular as you would expect a place like that to be. On the way down the mountain and back to the car I had a hunch that there was more, so I walked past a few metal drums and followed a disappearing path when I spotted another vehicle affected by said landslide, a mostly buried car. Pressed for time I took a couple of quick shots and finally left – very pleased as I just had explored yet another beautiful original find.

Back home I posted a couple of photos on the *Facebook page of Abandoned Kansai* (lots of time exclusive content, sometimes years before it finds its way to the website!) and they all did surprisingly well – the vertical one of the front of the bus actually became the most successful AK photo on FB so far with almost 250 reactions, also attracting a few dozen new subscribers. (In average posts tend to gather between 50 and maybe 80 reactions…) So while my expectations on exploring the Abandoned Vehicle Quarry were low, my expectations on the performance of this article are actually quite high – and I hope you like the following photo set as much as I enjoyed creating it!

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