Back to Japan for the 11th time - October and November 2024 - Page 9

I took so many photos I did not bother with photos of Isehara station. You catch the Odakyu line rapid express from Shinjuku, it takes about an hour, and then get onto a very crowded bus. I thought I was not going to get on, and it is a Tuesday! On the weekends it must be murder. Here is the site that will greet you when you get off the bus.

I will go up in that direction. Blue skies today.

The walk up to the funicular railway which they still call a cable car even though it isn't hanging from a cable, already involves many steps, and goes through these quasi shopping areas. The many steps would make this impossible for the frail and elderly which kind of defeats the purpose of what I will call the ropeway as they also use that term too. There is no actual convenience store, but there are a lot of vending machines, but NONE of them have a bottle bin. I usually drink a full bottle in one gulp (in addition to the two I carry) last thing before starting a hike and throw it away, not today - but that was ok because it was a short hike.

GO STRAIGHT AHEAD. Do not be lazy.

The path up to where the cable car goes is full of shrines, and is mostly a staircase like this. The cable car only goes half way up the mountain as you shall soon see.

First of many shrines. Somewhat abandoned.

Stairs to main shrine. If you take the ropeway funicular cable railway you do not even need to do these stairs.

A view. Not a good photo, too much contrast.

We are getting to the main shrine, quality of fittings has improved.

Proof I did not go on that thing. It goes every 20 minutes. At this section it goes through a tunnel.

Very steep and a huge number of other hikers, even though it was Tuesday. Top tip - do not go here on a weekend.

Just below the main shrine is a series of ice cream shops for the cable car goers.

A bit of colour today, but I looked at my last visit which was much more colourful, despite being on 7 November.

High quality stairs.

The view out onto the ocean is towards Enoshima, I think.

There it is! Let's go through the gate.

Any bear dumb enough to turn up here is basically on a suicide mission, and will be shot by park rangers and become bear curry (yes they really have that and they really do shoot bears that are in tourist areas).

"The shot" for today.

The real hike begins just behind the main shrine, after you ascend this ridiculously steep staircase (I am at the top looking down). You will see it again later with a rescue team!

The stairs become rocks mostly after the shrine. But a lot of the time the rocks are arranged nicely.

Memories of Mount Tanzawa from a couple of days ago.

Hmm, am I too early or too late for peak colour? I think the season is very confused.

We will see some more mountains in that direction soon.

I love looking into the sun at moss covered rocks.

The coastline. A bit cloudy, so no Fuji view. I have not seen Fuji even once on this trip which is unusual.

About to enter the summit shrine area.

There is no cable car to take people to the summit, but there is a little goods train rail thing, I think on weekends they have a little shop.

Possibly a shop, possibly a shrine, they all have garage doors! People were bowing at them anyway but they looked a bit confused at times.

Summit marker, a lot of people on the large developed summit area.

View from the top... cut those trees down!

There is even a public toilet on the summit. I went over near it to take this photo.

Looking back towards Tokyo, or maybe it is Yokohama. It is all city.

Across there is Mount Tanzawa, where I was in the fog a few days ago. No fog today.

Time to descend and appreciate some leaf colours.

A rare flatter section of the trail.

More mossiness. Yeah, mossiness is a word.

Last view shot.

As you can see there are a few spots to sit for a rest along the way.

OK, then back at the stair case I came across 20 or so rescue rangers. They seemed to be having a great time. There really are about 20 of them, you cannot see them all because of how steep the stairs were. So I assumed they were on a training drill, but then I noticed they had an old lady on a stretcher with a bandage on her head and an ice bag on her bandage.
I still was not sure if it was a training drill or not, but when I got to the bottom (they took the cable car and it took just as long as it took me to walk), they were loading her into an ambulance. So if you fall and hit your head, 20 guys will come and attend to you.

Below the shrine there is an alternative path that no one seems to take. It runs almost parallel to the main path and is barely any longer. If you go this way you can appreciate this grave, with pipes made to look like a paperclip and some sort of plastic embellishment.

The path down on this trail was no less a staircase than the other path.

I stood here studying my map, because it seems there is a trail on that ridge. Maybe next time!

And after not even 4 hours, I was back at the bus, and I literally ran straight onto a waiting bus that departed seconds after I boarded.
Only one more hike to go! (insert sad face?)

Coredo spans several blocks, all joined up underground.

Just one of thousands of areas with trees strangled by lights.

Still part of Coredo.

The start of the main bit. I saw a couple of Ferrari's getting parking tickets. I have a feeling it would be a very low fine in Japan.

Crap photo, I cut off the top of the building.

If you visit Ginza, give the surrounding streets a look too, not just the main one. It has expanded into 2 or 3 blocks wide.

There was a sign claiming this was an art installation, and seemingly only one person at a time was allowed inside the barrier.

Refer to my previous comment, this is a street that runs parallel to the Ginza main street.

And finally for my dinner, BEAN curry. Well that is what it translated to, but it is lentil based vegetarian curry, with extra salad on the side that I think they gave me because I had to wait a while. It was excellent.
Tomorrow is NOT a hiking day. I like typing in all caps a lot today.

Ikebukuro station. Enjoy the rain.

This entire building is claw machines. Not just at street level, all levels. There were people in there trying to win a package of spam or some laundry detergent.

Inside Sun City there is a line forming already for a 5pm CD signing. I am almost certain they are lined up for something that will occur in 7 hours time. Also, CD's still exist?

Now it is time to explore all the capsule machines. These are not the same as claw machines, but both are effectively a form of gambling. With the capsule machines you have to probably buy 20 or more capsules to collect all 5 in a collection.

Because it would be really important to make sure you get all 5 in the press butter sand miniature charm collection.

Out on the roof is smurf land. Raining again, time to head back inside.

The top floor of Sun City has the large Bandai brand weird hobby shop, which is mainly capsule machines too.

Crap photo, but you can look down on a cat cafe. I threw some empty capsules down for them the play with.

Noted.

This art installation is for cardboard cutouts of Japanese computer game / anime tennis players, complete with sound effects of balls being hit. I had to wait a few minutes to take a photo as many girls were excitedly taking a photo with every single one of them.

Big claim, huge if true.

Getting across town to Intermediateque was easy as the Maronouchi line takes me directly there. I just looked up Maranouchi, it is not an Italian sandwich maker, it means inside the circle in Japanese, and is an area located within the imperial palaces outer moat. Anyway, here is the Tokyo staion undergound, in all its gloom.

Intermediatheque is inside the KITTE building, named after Knight Rider and located in the old Post office. There are a lot of high end shops in here, I did not know it existed before today, you cannot tell from the outside as it looks like an office building.

Now for Intermediateque. It is a "Permanent exhibition of the scientific & cultural heritage collections of the University of Tokyo". So mainly bones, stuffed birds, animals in jars, mineral samples and fossils. This is a historic lecture theatre which I presume they moved here from the university.

Bones.

More bones. The whole place seems like a rich guys study filled with peculiarities pillaged from various world tours involving trunks and train travel.

You can get a good view of Tokyo station from out of the window.

I will see you tomorrow!

And now, Super Mario Xmas! Really, the Maranouchi building has replaced xmas with the Super Bright Holiday Super Mario experience. Very inclusive, except if you prefer Sony to Nintendo.

Crossing the Sumida river in the rain. Not a great view from this bridge, plus I have to be careful not to let a drop of water enter my delicate camera.

Three dead pigs strung from the wall of a restaurant. This is what ends up in your ramen.

The restaurants under Ryogoku station provide some good photo opportunities.

Rainy back streets make for good reflections.

Here is a long exposure of this sumo stadium. I put my camera on the fence post and the security guard was not happy about it once he noticed me. I attempted to take a better framed photo than this but apparently, no photo, so I fled.

Here is the tourist information centre with fake sumo.. square. I do not know why but I assumed they were a circle rope inside an octagon. There are actually a few nice little restaurants to eat at in this tourist info centre.

And so here is my ramen, with natto. A bit unusual! The pork was of a good quality. It is a very big serve, I could not eat it all.
Current plan is that tomorrow will be a hiking day, the last one of this trip.

Nishi-Agano station. A couple of other hikers got off but I was in front of them. They were old and slow.

The streets in the local area are quite nice. There is no convenience store, but there are vending machines. Buy whatever you need to eat before you get to Nishi-Agano. There is actually a small shop inside Hanno station where you have to transfer if you have time.

Turn right at the rubbish pile...

Only about the first km was a road today, but a nice road. Having said that there are a couple of roads to cross on the actual hike.

Today's bear warning sign, and a small shrine. The path to take is not the path to that shrine.

Graves of former hikers who succumbed to bears.

The lower parts of today's hike were ferny and wet.

Actually the first third of the hike was a very good trail like this. There were some recent signs for a trail running marathon that had used this route.

Here is the view just before the main shrine, still some fog around.

This is where you walk along the road to go through the shrine, there are some old produce stalls here but it looks like they have not been used for many years.

Oh hello there.

I guess I am heading in that direction.

The actual shrine here is fairly subdued.

It appears to be a shrine for pairs of thongs (flip flops for the parts of the world that consider thongs to be ass crack floss).

Probably the best view shot of the whole day. There were really not too many opportunities for a view.

OK... after the shrine, the trail on the map is GONE. You will end up at a landslide. Back track, follow the other trail, there is a temporary way up onto the ridge. You need to find the location in this photo to know you are back on track. I messed around for at least 30 minutes going into dangerous locations where the trail had vanished.

Now for a lot of tree roots.

As always, despite this being very steep, you cannot photograph steep.

This is the next spot, between 2 minor peaks, where I crossed a road. There is a little shelter here, but there is no bus or parking that I could see.

Serious roots.

A bit more view. This is an area I have not really been to before, it is a bit further north of where I normally go.

Nice cloud looking into the sun.

There is not a lot of power infrastructure in this area, but here is one giant power pole, but it has no cables. Presumably someone took down the cables and sold them at the scrapyard.

There are a few different ways to go in this area, a map (despite my earlier rant) is probably required to get back to the right station.

Now to start the ascent to the main peaks for the day.

Some colour! Finally. Not much colour on today's hike.

More great tree roots.

I thought this was the main peak of the day, no view, but it is not, still one more down and up again for this hike.

Finally approaching the main peak.

And here it is, with no view, Izugatake.

Some nice moss.

Best I can do for a view shot near the summit. The first part of the descent was very perilous. A lot of rope, I got a bit of minor rope burn.

A tiny bit more view.

The fog came back. Nice.

I descended back below the fog. Slow going due to rocks and steepness.

A little bit more colour as I head back into the woods.

More moss and areas that will be logged in the future.

After a couple more paths merged together, the path got quite a bit more developed for the last couple of kilometres.

Shomaru station. I literally ran at full speed the 1.8km from the end of the trail to the station when I checked my phone and saw that if I ran as fast as I could, I would just make a train. If I missed it, 45 minute wait. I made it with seconds to spare... just enough time to take this photo.

I intended to take a stance shot on the platform, but there was no time, so the best I can do is a selfie on the train, much to the amusement of the elderly people onboard.

Flower shops are everywhere for drunk businessmen to apologise with. This one has particularly blinding lights.

Akihabara time. Everyone has been here. I was here a few weeks ago. I never actually seem to go into any of the shops, just walk through it and observe all the tourists, of which I am one.

Go karts have evolved. Now they are car shaped, but go kart sized with angel wings. Please do not give yah kart any of your money. Sadly more go karts to come tonight too.

Street scene.

The electronics store so big it has a food court.

Yep, more go karts. Blue ones this time. I also nearly got run over (again) by the red ones. I feel as though there must now be more than 50 groups of these terrorising the streets every night.

Finally, here is my curry. It is a bit different. First of all you get a big cube of fatty pork (on the left). Then the brown stuff on top of the rice is a pepper and spice mix. You could customise how much pepper and how much chilli you want. It was very good. Plus, baby corn on top, which always means it is a good meal.
Tomorrow is actually the longest day of all. My flight is at 9:55pm, I have to check out of my hotel by 11am. I plan to go somewhere quite far away to kill time by sitting on trains.