Two-day hike up Kumatori-san - day 1

So, last weekend was a bank holiday here, and we decided to go away for the weekend. We have a 'hiking in Japan' book burning a hole in our bookshelf, so it had to be used.

We chose a hike which the author described as 'easy' - glad we started on an 'easy' hike, as this turned out to be far from the truth!

We started out early (7ish) on Saturday morning, and caught the train to the end of the line (Tokyo is surrounded by mountains, so all the 'local' trains stop at the edges. By the time we'd travelled the two hours to the end station, we really did feel like we were in the sticks (final train didn't take our 'Pasmo' cards (like Oyster cards in London) and so we had to buy our tickets in Japanese - always a laugh! ...and off we went!

We caught a bus (pointing out the symbol for the name of the place to the bus driver, and counting the number of stops until we reached said symbol!) and off we got - seemingly in the middle of nowhere with another bus in an hour's time. We walked the 200 or so metres to the place where the book said, "now catch the cable car - it will prevent the hike up the steep mountain" to find a large chunk of concrete which looked like it once housed a cable car, "once housed" being the key words in this sentence! We had no choice but to hike up. It was steep, and yes, those bags were very heavy !! (Ross weighed them when we got back, Ross's was 18kg, mine 13kg, Neve had a bag of water, and Felix all the food!)




This is what the climb looked like - it was very steep and very hot! After about 2 hours we got to the top... and the start of the walk!

There was some beautiful scenery, and some cool bits where we were walking in the clouds!

At dusk, we caught a beautiful sunset (we were

lathering up with mozzy lotion at this time - there were hundreds of them, and loads of dragonflies too!)

There were several summits on the way (this is Felix NOT being very Japanese!)

This is an arty shot by Ross - rather good I thought

...and here's one of Neve looking Kuwai (aka cute!)

Some of the path was along quite a steep edge with drops down each side

...here's a pretty waterfall - it was made into a kind of temple - they seem to have lots of temples near to waterfalls

...and up and up we go!

This is Felix turning Japanese

This was quite near the beginning of the walk, but it's really difficult to move these pictures around!

Here's Neve and Ross also turning Japanese!

There were parts of the hike that were really steep - more like climbing! you can see how much lower the guys behind us were!

The plan was to end the first day at this hut, camp and have dinner there. We didn't arrive there until 7:30pm (it was dark by this time - fortunately Ross's military planning had insisted we buy torches, and the kids had managed to ask someone to help them find them in the Japanese Supermarket (most impressive!)). We arrived at what we thought was the hut shown on the map, to see a derilict building - this was a bit of a heart sink moment (what the ?&%^ are we going to do now!) however, we remembered that there was another hut shown on the map - another few minutes up the mountain revealed tents with lights on - a big sigh of relief! Got there, and paid to pitch our tent. Then we asked about dinner - another heart sink moment - it was very clear that dinner had long since finished, and they thought we were a bit mad asking for it now!

Howveer they had lots of water, orange juice bottles and HOORAY beer and pot noodles, so we made do with the remains of our lunch time sandwiches, some buns we'd packed, beer / juice and pot noodles (don't worry, we thought, we'll be able to stuff our faces at breakfast!) Teeth cleaned, nice clean loo, and off to put up the tents in the side of a hill in the dark - what fun!