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Published: September 7th 2013
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I'm sure that posting blogs about hiking Mt. Takao - which I tend to every couple of months because it's easy and close and I am very fond of this little mountain <3 - isn't very exciting, but today something exciting DID happen! I found something NEW on Mt. Takao!
I mostly just wanted to get out of the house and into the fresh air and active; it's been largely too hot to really run, save for a few blissfully cool enough evenings that I didn't feel like I was in a sauna the second I stepped out of my air-conditioning. We've been doing weekly zumba classes with Rani, my amazing friend and zumba instructor, and it's been quite good at keeping me active even in the summer heat. Today's weather was below 100 degrees in the heat index (finally) and I decided to go out and do a pleasant hike on Mt. Takao.
Usually, Mt. Takao for me is just the starting off point for a longer hike across other mountains, so I rarely linger and actually spend time on Mt. Takao. Today I took the longest trail up, that takes you over Mt. Inari before you get
to the summit (a tiny mini-mountain next to Takao), and then after spending some time chillin' at the summit, decided that I would take the #1 trail down, because it's the only trail I've never taken and I wanted to see what it was like.
Mt. Takao has a cable car that takes people who don't want to hike about halfway up the mountain. I always pass the cable car station on the ground, but had never actually figured out where it was that the car took people on Takao itself. So as I set off, I noticed that I was walking on a paved trail that was basically mostly just a slightly downhill sidewalk, and was immediately confused - but then I found the temple!
There's an entire temple complex on Mt. Takao! Not just a shrine building, but an ENTIRE COMPLEX, with charms and shops and many, many buildings in the temple itself, as well as statues and other things. I WAS SHOCKED AND SURPRISED.
And then confused as to how I missed that my mountain has this huge thing on it that I didn't know about?!
I mean how do you not know
about that, haha. To be fair, I guess, I never take the cable car and I always take the mountainside hiking trails, so I've never even gotten close to that area before, but still... kind of pathetic. It was a really awesome area, the temple was beautiful, and I'm excited to go back in November when autumn colors start up because it'll all just be fantastic! Anyway, today I took a lot of pictures of my (hilarious and sad) new find, so it was a good day out at Mt. Takao.
And for the first time, I hiked up the mountain and went back down to the same station I started at, which I had actually never done at Takao before haha.
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