28 October 2019
Expensive trip to small mountain
Daytrip to hike Mount Tsukuba using public transport
Today I went to the second most popular mountain near Tokyo, Tsukuba. Strangely I have not been here before, I thought I had, but my memory was wrong. I checked and now know that on a rainy day when I came to Tokyo for the weekend a few years ago I actually went to Takao not Tsukuba. It is a little bit surprising that I had not been here before, but now that situation is fully remedied with great remediation.
As the title alludes to, it was really quite expensive! You have to take a private railway, the Tsukuba Express, then a 40 minute bus ride. All up to go there and back cost over $50! Extorionistic I say.
For many people the cost would be much higher as you are supposed to take 2 cable cars, of course I mocked them and threw rocks at them and hiked.
Something I predicted would happen at some point on this trip already happened, the main trail was closed due to fallen trees. I suspect I could have just ignored that and found a way around them, but since there were other trails to choose from on this mountain, I decided to heed the warnings. It did seem strange when the hikers that got off my bus all went the wrong way, turns out they were right and I was wrong.
Anyway, despite the high cost, it was a good day of hiking a small mountain, it serves as a warm up for longer, more boring hikes to come, so heed my warning.
Frequently, when I get to the start of the trail, I cannot actually take a photo of the mountain because it looks like a wall of trees with no peak. To remedy that, today I took a photo out the bus window. There are actually 2 peaks to climb, the male and female peak. I climbed both. This photo came out really well considering its taken through glass from a moving bus.
The view from the bus stop was decent. A bit hazey today, absolutely no wind, definitely shorts and t-shirt weather.
Hard to get lost, the giant red gate shows you the way. Those are some nice powerlines too!
Obviously there will be a shrine. Both trails up start from here, turn left for one, turn right for the other.
DAMN IT! As I said, theres more than one path up, and a different way again most of the way down. Its convenient that they added English to the sign, and Chinese, no Korean though. Luckily I can not read Korean, otherwise I would have been here all day reading the sign had they remembered to add it.
Time to engage in some forest bathing. It is now legally mandated that all salary men spend one day a month forest bathing (unpaid).
There are many auspicious rocks on this mountain, most of them have something to do with fertility, as does the whole male and female mountain thing. The bus to get here had a soundtrack explaining it all, suggesting that the mountain peaks were highly compatible.
There are also mini roped off shrines that you cannot really get to and see. Japan loves ropes.
This rock gives men amazing power! Theres a page of Japanese text, and in English it says 'MAN POWER ROCK'. Hmm, it looks way more feminine than masculine.
The horror, the horror! Despite quite a lot of kind of dangerous scrambling over rocks, a lot of school groups featuring children no older than 10 are making the journey, very very.... very slowly. No way to pass. No amount of me swearing and throwing stuff at them would make them get out of my way. My journey up from here on in was slow. They had not come the entire way up, but the path over the rocks from the cable car is the tricky bit.
A glimpse of the cable car that delivered small children onto my path.
Summit time. This is the female summit. Fun fact, male and female are the same sounding words in Chinese and Japanese, nan for men, nu for women.
The view. I culled a lot. Some of that haze is farmer smoke. I think I saw on the tv news this morning a smoke warning.
The path across the ridge, past the other cable car (there are 2 different ones) to the man mountain.
NAILED IT! On the first attempt too!
Here is the mini shrine on the top of the female mountain that is a girls only toilet, make up shop and place to gossip about how your other female work mates are all bitches.
Like most Japanese mountains, there are many contraptions set up to allow the Emperor to effectively communicate with the sky demons.
You will see that on the saddle area between peaks there are a lot of shops. This shop however is on its own in a very nice spot, so nice that it has zero customers. I got their hopes up as I staggered out to the edge to take this photo. But then I just walked off.
Here are the shops near the other cable car station, from these I made a purchase as you shall see.
I knew what the coffee was, I take mine black in Japan when it comes in a can, but the biscuit / cookie looking thing I had no idea. Will it be savory or sweet? It had no discernible odor. I bit into it, half expecting it to taste like fish or soap. No! It is a block of honeycomb! Now I have the diabeetus!
If you get off the cable car and buy a block of honeycomb, this is your view.
The short path up to the top of man mountain was not long, in fact it was short as I just said, but still had some technical sections like this to scramble up. Fun times. Some of these rocks had been worn very smooth, quite treacherous on the way down.
View from man mountain.
It was now time to head back to girl mountain, or more politically correct, woman mountain, and find a way down to the other shrine / cable car. Lets get going!
I found the other path, which was a lot less technical.
THATS MY BUS! I ran dangerously down the last bit, the bus set off without me, I stood in the road and flagged it down and he let me on, but this caused all kinds of confusion in charging me the right extremely high fare as the machine had already ticked over to a slightly less extremely high fare. There was more confusion when I got off again, and a lot of very fast speaking in Japanese, to which I nodded and smiled.
Yeah, its the inside of a bus. Despite the high cost, Mount Tsukuba is a fun day trip from Tokyo, especially if you are not into 6 hour plus hikes, this one can be done slowly in about 4 hours. Slow because of school kids.