May 26, Mt. Hiei

Today's entry might be a bit shorter because I am COMPLETELY exhausted AND I need to do my topic presentation about why the Japanese population keeps getting smaller.

Well today was an adventure. That's for sure. After class we went to Mt. Hiei. No one had been here before and we started off the journey in the wrong way. We paid 300 yen to get in to this place where there were a few little temples and shrines when we really wanted to go to the top of Mt. Hiei. The lady at the gate didn't speak any English...

The shrines that we saw were cool and very pretty. There was also a waterfall that had some freshwater crabs at the bottom. That was something I had never seen before. When we found out the way to climb the mountain was the other way, we exited the park area and headed up a giant staircase. I led the way and took off ahead in front of the group. The staircase took about 10 minutes and after the staircase was a big winding uphill road. After the road was another staircase that took about 10 minutes to climb. By this time I had waited a few minutes and Ryan caught up to me. The rest of the group was way behind. I figured we were had made some significant progress and were getting close but I jokingly yelled back at the group, "We're not even halfway there!" They all groaned and were like, "Are you serious!?" They were all pretty tired.

Past the second staircase was a winding path through the forest. Ryan and I were far ahead of the rest, traveling at a brisk pace. We kept going for 30 minutes and said to each other, there's no way anyone else is gonna make it this far. We were un-phased by the mountain and kept going. We found this hotel/nice building and there was a nice view from there. About 30 minutes later, an hour and a half into the hike, we reached a temple. At the temple there was a huge bronze bell that you could strike with a swinging log. Me and Ryan both hit it and it was awesome. The bell kept ringing and reverberating the entire time we were there. We found a map of the mountain to figure out how close we were to the top... We were about 1/3 of the way up. Wow. Welp we needed to get some water because we had a heck of a hike ahead of us. We asked a man working there if there was any place to get water and he led us to one of the shrines. There was a little stream of water trickling out of a bronze dragon's mouth. Ryan filled up his water bottle...slowly...and we both took a drink out of it and he filled it up again. We then asked the man about the best way to go to get to the top and he looked at us like we were crazy and laughed. He was thinking, "Crazy gaijin trying to hike to the top..."

On we went with some fresh sacred water of the dragon. We continued past shrines that hadn't been maintained or attended to in what looked like years. Past overgrown gardens, grave markers. We kept going for another hour and a half. We finally reached a peak where there was nowhere to go but down. But there wasn't a shrine and garden like it said on the map... It was just a few radio towers... We must have made it to the wrong peak...

So we started heading down. But going down, it didn't look familiar... We got to a big clearing with all these trees with long branchless trunks and we knew we were lost. We jokingly started discussing survival tactics which we both enjoyed and hoped we might have to use someday. We kept going down for another 20 minutes and saw a road. We had to scale a pretty steep cliff and then hop a fence to make it to the road. We then walked down this winding road for 10 or so minutes until we came to a bus stop. I was able to make out the schedule in Japanese, and the bus had stopped coming an hour earlier...

At this point the thought of hitchhiking was a very realistic and preferable option. We sat down at the bus stop for a bit to recuperate and then we continued down the road. We found a parking lot and an old man was walking past us. We knew there was a cable car that went up and down the mountain and asked him where that was. He told us it was closed and offered us a ride in his car. We quickly jumped in! He drove us for a half hour down the mountain and to the closest JR station. We were extremely grateful to him.

We headed back to the hotel where I am now. I am going to do my topic presentation and go to bed!!!