Mountains were Meant to be Climbed

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Shortly after the tea ceremony in Kyoto, the leaves started to change, so my buddy John and I headed off for a hike. Now, I must say, I was rather impressed with John, as I forewarned him that it's best not to encourage me when I have "good ideas" or I'll do some crazy stuff. Well, despite my warnings, John proved to encourage me the whole way!

Our plan was to hike to the top of Mt Hie to see the incredible leaves and the temple on top of the mountain- then hit some places around Kyoto and grab dinner. The flaw in our plan...we could not find the trail up the mountain!?!?! Actually, we were told my locals there wasn't one! (I got the idea from an emergency foreign teacher in passing and that was all we had to go on)...

So, coming up with a brilliant idea, I figured "who needs a path?!" We can follow the cable car up and we'll end up fairly close. Well, good in theory, but neither of us expected the incline we soon encountered. We spent most of the day wishing we had crampons, but enjoying the adventure and finding vines and ridges we were able to manage. The only downfall (or one of many, rather) we were not able to follow the cable car because of the terrain, so we set of on a hike with ... well, lets just say different ideas. I (gotta love the optimism) was convinced we could get to the top and recover our lost ground on the ridge, finding the original destination... John was convinced it was impossible, but willing to humour me, as long as I would not be disappointed with not finding it....

The few glimpses of view we got were beautiful (the trees blocked a lot of our view, but the natural surrounding was great - a welcomed break from the city of umeda. So, we continued to climb, me still believing over every hill we would see the top and a way to head back towards the cable car when we reaches our "we have to turn back before it gets dark limit"). With my usual "just 10 more minutes", we managed to convince ourselves that if we almost ran down the trail, we could go for another 10 minutes (I warned him not to encourage me!) and then we began to see light through the trees, not like before, we were certain it was the top... so we went "10 more minutes" and then we found some curious stones and bells (for summoning the gods at temples) so we got inspired and torqued it up the hill convincing ourselves that we would be able to find an alternative and quicker way down ;0)

We did manage to find the cable car, so we went to the top to enjoy the sunset. Of course, we decided to hike down to the second cable (I guess we were inspired by reaching the top?!?) ... I did mention, the sun had set and we went into a cedar forest - so it was a bit of a challenge not to sprain our ankles, and cedar woods at night are creepy - there is not other way to describe it, it seemed like we were in one of those dangerous forests you always read about with fear in children's stories... so we opted to take the second cable car down the rest of the way.

So by the time we made it down (covered in twigs and scrapes) we stopped by a local noodle shop for some ramen and got quite the reaction from the fellow in the ramen shop two foreigners, (John being well over six feet tall and me with red hair & freckles) he seemed very excited to learn that we were teaching in japan. Meanwhile, John and I started dreaming up more travel plans than possible (we figure if we leave at the same time we'll take the trans-Siberian train across Russia together - then on from there... )

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