lost or what?

Getting to Tsukuba involves a long expensive train (The Tsukuba express) and then a rather long bus ride.
The bus goes from bus bay one, and is generally timed to meet the train, but don't mess about on the transfer, follow the other hikers with haste.

Here's the low down view from where you get off the bus. Silvery clouds today, but also a lot of sun.

Every person that goes here uses this photo as their cover photo. I will not.

The visitor centre, and the mountain behind it.

The immediate area has a lot of shrines and hotels and shops, but no convenience store, which was very inconvenient. I bought drinks from vending machines.

They are however very nice shrines.

None of the shops were selling anything suitable for a hiking snack. They were all selling ice creams. The best I could do was wasabi broad beans. Hence I am now full of beans.

The trail starts just to the right of the main cable car station. No cable cars for me, which goes without saying even though I just said it.

It is a very nice trail, with all the different styles of Japanese hiking trail on one hike.

There are also a lot of very nice rest areas. This whole area is ridiculously popular on weekends, it was still quite popular on a Tuesday. Public urination without alarmed spectators was challenging.

I waited a while for the cable car to come, it did not. This cable car is a cable pulled tram carriage built on an angle, just like the one in Hong Kong.

No Autumn colours yet, but still great scenery.

Most of the rest areas were also mini shrines of some kind, with locals stopping to do some kind of mini ritual.

Although much of the trail was tree roots and rocks, there were parts with steps such as this.

Once you get to the summit area, you will realise it is not actually the summit. It is a saddle between 2 summits, with a lot of ice cream shops.

Here is the view you can experience if you were to have an ice cream. There are also public toilets. I had some wasabi broad beans.

The walk up to the first summit, from where I would double back, was probably the nicest part of the hike.

Some almost twilight light shots (does that make sense at all?) looking into the sun, with the clouds and whatever.

There are still some challenging rocky bits to climb despite being a few hundred metres away from the ice cream shop. I am glad they have not erected a proper staircase (yet).

Nice tree tunnel.

Here is summit number one of two. It is 8 metres lower than the other peak that you will soon see.

View from the summit.

And some more view, without obstructions. It looks like I am up really high due to the prominence, but I am not really, just under 900m.

More rocks and leaves.

After I ran past the ice cream shops I took pause to look back at summit number one before proceeding to summit number two. You can see a junior school group sitting in a roped off area on the left.

At a random spot in the middle of nowhere, table service, with table cloths.

Here is summit number two, and as you can see, a lot of other people.

View from summit number two.

All the summits have little shrines, this one has a bridge for matchmaking, according to a sign and picture.

A bit more view looking away from Tokyo.

Now it is time for many large rocks. They get larger the further you proceed along the trail.

Big rocks and low bamboo oh my.

This is the one you can walk through.

The rest areas on this hike are of a very high quality.

Time to descend. Still a great view.

There was even a wheat field.

I sat here for the last of my broad beans.

Here is the other cable car, an actual cable car.

I still had to complete the triangle, or more of a rhombus, by walking back to the first cable car line from the bottom of the other cable car line. It was a very quiet very developed path that I had to myself.

And then the hike ends as it started, with a shrine. A different one to before. So many shrines.