japan lights natural_scenery takaosan vehicles

Story time! Japan celebrates a statutory holiday called “Sports Day” every year. It’s a day dedicated to the pursuit of health and longevity through physical activities and general healthy lifestyle choices.

To celebrate this day, I joined a few of my fellow co-op student friends on a day trip to hike Mount Takao, or “Takaosan,” as the Japanese name would be romanized. Mount Takao is relatively accessible from central Tokyo, with a single train line travelling from Shinjuku Station all the way to the foot of Mount Takao. I guess they get lots of tourists for that reason, and so the hiking routes were actually fairly well-developed with paved paths going all the way to the summit, even supplemented by well-placed vending machines at appropriate pit-stops.

The hike wasn’t particularly arduous, especially compared to what I’m used to in the Rocky Mountains, but we were pretty tired by the time we got to the top. Maybe my backpack was too heavy or something. As for the others idk what their excuses were ! XD !

In any case, we reached the top after around 3 hours, and there was a phenomenal view of the clouds and the sky unlike anything I’d ever seen from the ground. Normally, I only ever see the top of clouds from a window seat on an airplane, but the summit of Mount Takao was rising above the clouds that day, and it felt like I was seeing a real life heaven.

Our original plan was to time our hike so that we’d reach the summit a little bit before sunset. That way, we could rest and take photos, and see a killer sunset before making our way back down. But we ended up getting to the top with an hour to spare, and no one particularly felt like squatting up their for an hour, so we just started on our foot journey back down.

Well turns out leaving early was the right choice, because boy was it getting dark. I mentioned that the hiking route was fairly well-developed, but that was only mostly true up until you considered the lighting aspect. There were no lights at all!!! We were just walking in a wooded mountain (on a paved path), with no lights to help see where we were going. And while the route was still paved, there were definitely some steep paths that forced us to take care with our footing, so having to do all of that in the dark just multiplied the difficulty factor by a whole tenfold.

This photo was taken during our descent in the darkness just as a little van came driving down the mountain, illuminating our path for a brief, fleeting moment. There definitely wasn’t enough space in the vehicle for five of us people to all squeeze in, and I definitely wasn’t taking any chances with discovering what the Japanese attitude towards hitch-hiking was, especially given our lack of skill in the Japanese language department.

…

We all made it back home alive!

We were also originally planning on visiting the local onsen for a nice rest after our trip. After all, the onsen was conveniently located right next to hiking trail entrance! Unfortunately a few of our party members were not too keen on dropping their pants down in front of each other, which I will say is entirely understandable.