lost or what?

Here is my train after I got off of it at Kaimon station. You need to buy a paper ticket at Kagoshima Chuo station, no IC card, no credit card tap (they have that at some stations now). You have to change trains from a 2 carriage to this one carriage train at Yamakawa, but everyone else will do the same thing so it is easy enough. BTW, both the one carriage and 2 carriage trains have toilets on board, the cool school boys hang out by the toilet.

Kaimon is a small place, but a lot of people travel here to take photos of the mountain with sunflowers in front of it, hence there is a Family Mart.

It is only a short walk up the road to the start of the proper trail. This mountain is sometimes referred to as Satsuma Fuji, as any time a local authority can stick Fuji in their marketing, they feel obliged to do so.

The start of its trail, and all it's many warnings. You are supposed to scan a QR code and fill out a form, I did not.

The trail was immediately excellent, and remained excellent for the whole clockwise rotation up and around the back of the mountain to the top, there is no respite, it is constantly uphill.

The soil was very volcanic, broken bits of brown rock, but soon it will be boulders.

At times the trail ravine was deep.

First view. Clouds are coming, they are coming from the direction behind me.

Progress was slowed by a lot of rocks, for kilometres.

There is a cave system under this bit, I could not see the bottom of the hole behind these warning signs.

Next view point, along the coast, there was now thunder. There were really only 3 or 4 view points along the trail before the summit, the forest was quite thick, which would be a good thing once it started hailing.

There is a volcanic lake. Nice how the sun is shining on that one bit of farmland.

The upper parts of the trail were hard going, ropes and ladders.

Right before the summit is a mini shrine, newly painted red.

And here is the summit, first drops of rain right as I got to it.

It was really getting dark.

The summit view is not 360 degrees, at least I could not find a way to see it all. Rather than hang around and look for a view, I thought I better head down.

Does not look steep, but was, also slippery. I took it slow and stayed upright the whole way down.

It is me. It had not really rained by this point, but I was sweating and it was very windy.

One of the aforementioned ladders, about this time it started hailing, so the camera went away for a while.

The passing storm, a lot more thunder than there was lightning that I could see.

It was slow going, with intermittent hail, but my main judge of uncomfortably wet was never breached, my feet stayed dry.

This spot is a marked as a helicopter rescue point. Too windy for that today.

The storm cleared for a while, and I was beyond the boulder field, making good progress again.

And then before too long I was back at the bottom. That is the real sky, I have not replaced it with photoshop.

Now getting back to Kagoshima from Kaimon station was always going to take a long time, but today it took even longer. I was about an hour early for the train, so I spent time in the Family Mart and a local supermarket before just hanging out at the Kaimon station seen in the first pic. The first train came right on time, it comes once every 4 hours so do not miss it! You have to take a number when you board and then pay cash when you get off.
Anyway, the little train terminates at this station, Ibusuki, which is a tourist town where you get buried in sand for fun. I planned to change trains here to a limited express back to Kagoshima, but it was sold out! German cruise ship passengers had spent the day buried in sand and bought all the tickets.
So I had to wait around here for 50 minutes for the next slow all stations train, which added even more time onto an already long day.
Tonight's outing will likely be short.