Climb Every Mountain

Feeling really tired after the whole week of work and stress, I left the client site around 9pm. Although the new project is so close to my home, I cannot really relax because we are heading out to the mountain in 3 hours time.

Yes, it is another crazy hike. We left Tokyo by 1am in the morning and planed to hit the mountain trail by 5am to avoid the heat. I was really tired, that I crashed in the backseat the moment the car door slamed close. I cannot even be bothered to talk to Henry, the 7 year old boy, it turned out that both of us were sleeping like babies during the whole trip.



This hike is actually more interesting than Mount Fuji, we went through many different vegetation, from bamboo forest to needle leave pine, then to rocks. For the last 30 minutes, we even had to do a bit of rock climbing. The elevation is high enough (2500 m) that we were somehow away from the humidity and heat of Japanese summer for the whole ride.



This is what the last 30 minute hike looks like. Going up is a lot easier comparing to coming down...



Um, after the picture was taken, Yoshio, Tomomi and Yukiko and I all found a place to sit then dozing off... We were really too tired. If you come by to the mountain top, you would see us laying around on the volcanic rocky slabs in various position, sleeping and snoring. Man, how some people can function without proper hours of sleep is still beyond me. I am just half dead if not getting 8 hours of sleep every day.

After the hike, our whole body was reeking and sweaty, Yoshio has made the best planning, we are heading to the natural hotspring!

The onsen (hotspring) bath house is very intersting. It is obviously built by an amateur builder with cheap wood panels, not new at all. The owner has very interesting view of decoration, the western greeky statue about 40 cm high is pieced together with the Chinese style lucky lion in our outdoor bathtub. It is not too odd, I think the strange combination works just fine with the not-so-professional building style. And the best thing is, it is clean and the natural hotspring is so relaxing.

You can mix in the fresh cold water to the overheated bath, the cold water is also flown in from the nearby stream coiling down from the mountain. It looks and feels so pure and cool, um, I drank some of the untreated water, it is too tempting.



We ate soba after the onsen, um, very hungry.