Day 30: Mt. Hiei

At 10 AM this morning I set out for Mt. Hiei with my American housemates Adam and Nick. The foot of Mt. Hiei is about 6 kilometers away, but it's relatively flat and not too bad a trek by bicycle. We stopped at a Fresco (affordable grocery chain) and stocked up on fluids and snacks close to the base of the mountain and then started our climb. You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I climbed Inari. Well this was nothing like that. Inari's peak was a modest ~800 feet, though after climbing 800 feet of stairs you certainly won't think that's small. Hiei-zan however, is over 2500 feet tall, more than three times the height of Inari. Additionally, you will not find the helpful signs and frequent rest stops here. In fact, there are rarely even stairs. The most accomodating stretches have winding paths which can be summarily described in one word as treacherous. We chose in many places to forego even these luxuries in search of better sights. That was honestly pretty dumb, but it was also incredibly fun.

Just a few hundred meters from the start of our journey we found our first waterfall. This one was reinforced with concrete to control flooding. There were some rather steep steps off to the left that we took to get to the top.

Here is the view looking back at the city from the top of the waterfall. There was a path leading toward the summit, but we opted to follow the river. This was certainly not the safest decision, but if it makes you feel any more confident in my sanity we did have lots of supplies and first aid equipment. And the views were amazing.

A ways further up the river we ran into another waterfall. This one was clearly also reinforced by man, but not nearly to the extent of the first. There were no stairs here. The climb was rather more difficult.

This was I believe our third waterfall. This time we did get some stairs! But it looked like they were built over a century ago. Would you have even recognized them if I didn't say anything?

Here is basically the same shot with a slower shutter speed to make the water look neat. I did several of these, but many of them didn't turn out because it's hard to have steady hands on uneven ground.

I believe this was adjacent to our fifth waterfall. The difficulty just kept increasing. This one was incredibly steep with the top 10 feet or so being completely vertical. Although, someone recently had had the courtesy to anchor some ropes on their way up. Here you can see Nick closest to me and Adam up further a ways. We went one at a time so as to prevent any kind of deadly domino effect.

Looking back down. None of these pictures are really good at communicating depth perception, but that's roughly 30 feet down to the water in the upper right corner of this picture. That's roughly 1% of the way to the summit! Whoo!

Finally! A mostly unaltered waterfall. There's Adam on the right for scale. Climbing up those rocks was exhausting, but this was just the start of our journey.

Another quick vs. slow shutter speed shot.

 By about our tenth waterfall we were looking for signs of the trail. Finally, we saw a glimpse of a cyclist above us. On our way from the water to the path we saw this cute little guy slithering around. Don't worry, he's a ratsnake, i.e. non-venomous. We did see a few other lizards on our way, but they were too quick to get pictures of.

After rejoining the main path, it ran closer to the river at parts. Those are my pasty legs hanging over the edge of a large concrete wall that funneled into a waterfall. Again, you can't really tell but I'm about 30 feet above the ground.

This picture shows the kind of paths we were on. I don't know how well you can tell but either side of the path is incredibly steep, and the path itself is only about 2 feet wide. From this point it was about 1500 feet to the bottom. So uh, I don't think the First Aid would have helped if I'd slipped.

And there's the remaining 1000 feet to the top.

Here's some of the awesome "stairs" we were afforded. Constant rainfall had eroded the soft soil and just left behind hurdles where there used to be steps. This part wasn't actually hard to navigate though. It was a more heavily trafficked area and people had just established a sloping path beside the hurdles.

I wish I'd included something for scale, but this tree was massive! It was probably 5 feet in diameter and it seemed to go up forever.

Finally we were back to a more tourist-friendly area. This was just one of the many temples on Mt. Hiei. Unfortunately, it and a few of its neighbors were the only ones we got to see.

Taken near the previous picture. The city you see here is Otsu, and that massive body of water lake Biwa. If you're familiar with Minnesota geography, that sucker is about 25% larger than Lake Mille Lacs, and it's the largest lake in Japan.

This was actually taken pretty far from and long after the previous picture, but that's also Otsu and Lake Biwa.

We're even further up the mountain now. Only about 200 feet from the peak! In this picture you can see Otsu and Kyoto in the same shot. Otsu is to the left and Kyoto is in the background on the right. Technically that city in the mid-ground on the right is also Kyoto, but it's separated from the rest by a mountain. It's called the Yamashina ward, and I don't know much about it, but I believe it's mainly a residential area for affluent downtown Kyoto commuters. Just think, we walked from there! And it wasn't anything resembling a straight line either.

Unfortunately, I don't have any impressive pictures any higher than this. We got to about 50 feet from the peak, where there was a fork. One way went to the cable car that goes up and down the mountain and the other went up to the peak. Well, it took us seven whole hours to get to the top and the last cable car was leaving shortly. So, unless we wanted to do a 7 hour descent in the dark we had to abandon the idea of hitting the absolute top. Don't get me wrong, we were on top of the mountain, but there was a gentle slope that led to the highest point that we missed out on.

This is taken from the "ropeway" station. Think hanging gondola.

The gondola only went down so far, and then there was a cable car that went the rest of the way. This was taken at about 6:15 PM.

This was taken after taking the train from the cable car station back to where we parked our bikes. This is the last picture I took, Mt. Hiei from afar. It was pretty gratifying looking at that behemoth and knowing I'd conquered it.

All in all, on foot we traveled well over 10 km laterally and roughly 2.5 km vertically. I plan to return, but next time I'm taking the cable car up so I can see more of Enryaku-ji and the garden at the summit.

Day 24: More Kyoto-eki, Yodobashi Camera, and Kyoto Tower!

Sorry, nothing ancient today, mostly just life stuff and random observations. Before I get into that I'd like to say thanks to you all for all the positive feedback. If there is something in particular you'd like to see more of (e. g. social commentary, life updates, landscape photos, flora/fauna photos, architecture photos, daily life photos) let me know and I'll be sure to include it. 

So, this past week marked the start of classes. I got moved up to second year speaking and listening (thank you Yazawa-sensei!) after taking a secondary placement test, which is awesome because it starts at 1:00 pm instead of 9:00 am. Also, I managed to work out my schedule so that I have no morning classes and no classes Monday or Friday. It's amazing.

The rest of my classes are extremely interesting (not that Japanese isn't interesting). I chose to take many classes which include GGP (Japanese) students as well as SKP (international) students. These Japanese students are part of a program whereby they'll be studying abroad next year. Most of the classes focus on intercultural communication, the psychology and linguistics of it, and international relations. Many of them follow a pattern that includes a session during the lecture in which SKP students and GGP students form small groups and discuss some facet of the subject matter. It's extremely exciting to have the opportunity to openly discuss these kinds of topics with Japanese people in Japan. I love it. Anyway, I'll include more about that once I have some more solidly formed ideas.

I spent the first two days of my four day weekend inside cleaning and studying while it rained outside. Today the weather was overcast, but dry. So, I took the subway south to Kyoto Station to check out some more stuff in that area.

Dragonball Z is still a huge deal here. The curry place I go to always has contests where you can win a Dragonball Z memorabilia, and posters are plastered all over the place. Anyway, this is just a giant promotional Shenlong hanging out in Kyoto Station. He didn't grant me any wishes. Someone probably already asked him to bring back Krillin. Don't feel bad if you don't get that reference.

This is just some of the offerings at Shinshindo, an awesome boulangerie chain in Japan. There's one less than a five minute walk from my dorm, but I took this picture at the one in Kyoto Station.

From the station I entered the massive Yodobashi Camera building. You might think that Yodobashi Camera is just a camera store, but it's more like Best Buy got jacked up on steroids and had a love child with a shopping mall. It's got a footprint the size of a Target with three floors dedicated solely to electronics, two to clothing, one to toys and housewares, one to restaurants, and two to groceries/deli. Also crazy is the sheer amount of valuables basically just sitting out. All the lenses you see in this picture are over $2000 with some of the more valuable ones costing over $10,000 and this is a very small percentage of what's on display. In the U.S., Even among retailers which specifically sell photography equipment, most of them don't have a quarter of this selection and what they do have is locked up tight. There's another electronics retail giant named Bic Camera down the street, but I'll check that out another time. 

From Yodobashi I headed to Kyoto Tower. Kyoto Tower has appeared in a couple of my photos before. It's this giant lighthouse looking structure that sits kind of awkwardly on top of a 9 story hotel. It was built in the 1960s, and like many things from the '60s, now it looks kind of tacky. There's a two floor observation deck at the top that sits at 100 meters (~328 ft). So, I decided to check it out. It's kind of a hokey tourist trap sort of thing that looks like it hasn't had a face lift in 30 years. I have to admit though, while it was somewhat tacky and worn down it was also kind of charming. And the mascot was adorable:

Before you go up the observation deck they take your picture with him, but I wasn't gonna pay the 10 dollars afterwards to get my copy. Obviously, the view was awesome. There were mounted binoculars placed every 20 degrees or so along the upper deck with signs on the window of where to point to see specific monuments.

I took like 60 pictures, but I picked just a few to upload. This one just shows off the crazy sprawl of Kyoto. If you look really closely you can see the faint outline of Osaka in the distance. Apparently, on clear days you can pretty clearly see Osaka Castle through the binoculars. Keep in mind that Kyoto Station is at the south end of the city and Osaka is to the south, so most of Kyoto is actually behind me in this shot.

I just thought this picture looked kind of neat.

I finally got around to putting Photoshop on my laptop, and I figured these were perfect for turning into tilt-shift pictures. Basically, tilt-shift photos are supposed to make a real-life scene look like it's a diorama filled with miniatures by enhancing the vibrancy of the colors and employing a unique blurring effect that mimics the depth of field created with macro lenses. It's kind of a pain to do real tilt-shift photography but it takes less than a minute in Photoshop to replicate the effect pretty convincingly. If I took a little more time I could make it passable even to a trained eye, but I'm too lazy and too busy to bother right now.

You may also notice that I've resized all the pictures so that they should display better on your monitors and so it doesn't take forever to upload them on my lackluster connection.

Till next time!

Days 14 and 16: Heian-jingu, Shimogamo-jinja, Yasaka-jinja, and Kiyomizu-dera

It's been kind of rainy and cruddy on and off the last few days, but I've still managed to get out during the dry periods. The couple of times I've been out I've biked and hiked a ton so I didn't have the energy to put up pictures, so this is going to be a doubly long post. On Thursday I went to Heian-jingu after dropping some paperwork off at school.

That's the main shrine in the left background. This was taken near the main gate.

We paid about 600 yen (~6 dollars) to view the garden:

This tree branch was craaazy.

There was some herons and other cool stuff but I didn't bring my long lens so I couldn't get any decent pictures. You'll find that this becomes a theme.

Out of the garden and back at the shrine.

The main gate.

That torii in the background is huge.

Friday was rainy all day. I went to makudonarudo (McDonald's) and spent the rest of the day watching Netflix.

Saturday, however, I got out again and did lots of stuff. First I went to Shimogamo Shrine near Kamogawa (Kamo River) for a Ritsumeikan organized gathering. There was a Hanami festival going on with tons and tons of dance troops performing over the weekend.

I couldn't get great pictures of the dancers, but I wasn't about to try and get in front of parents. I thought it was kind of interesting that even in the same group dancers' ages went from kindergarten to retirement.

The food and souvenir vendors went on forever.

Entrance to Shimogamo-jinja

Saw this little guy (I think it's a skink), as soon as he noticed me he disappeared into a crack.

These funny little bugs were all over the surface of the water. Reminds me of those bugs from Super Mario 64. I know most of you won't get that reference, don't worry about it.

I started to get hungry so I went back to the vendor area outside the shrine:

These adorable little minibus food trucks were all over the place. I was pretty impressed with the amount of stuff they managed to cram in. They've all got like stoves, refrigerators, freezers, and espresso machines.

I headed down Kamogawa (river) towards Yasaka-jinja (shrine) on Shijo-dori (street). There were all kinds of cool hawks looking for dinner but again I didn't have the appropriate lens.

Entrance to Yasaka Shrine.

The main shrine

The stairs up to Anyo-ji (Buddhist temple)

Looking down at the city from in front of the temple

The temple

Looking down from behind the temple

There was a long winding path up the mountain behind the temple. This is about how dark it actually was, the camera eats up a lot of light even when it's dark out unless I tell it not to. Pretty spooky. I decided to turn around before going too far up because I wouldn't be able to see my way back if it got much darker.

After leaving the Yasaka-jinja/Anyo-ji area I headed towards Kiyomizu-dera. Kiyomizu-dera is possibly the most famous destination in all of Kyoto. Like if you're watching a movie that takes place in New York you'd see an establishing shot of the Statue or Liberty, or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. If it took place in Kyoto you'd see Kiyomizu-dera. There's a long steep street leading up to the temple that's about a kilometer long lined with all kind of souvenir shops and restaurants. I didn't take pictures because I was really tired and my memory card was getting full.

The entire temple is a marvel of woodworking as there is not a single nail in the entire structure. I'm not actually sure if that applies to the entire compound or just the main structure. The main temple is built into a cliff side high above a garden filled with Sakura and other types of trees. The view is pretty breathtaking.

This is taken from the main structure, high above the garden, looking out at the city. You can see Kyoto Tower on the left.

This was with my aperture wide open

This is closer to what it really looked like, but those trees in the background were a pretty vivid pink.

Looking down at the lit forest below from an elevated walkway.

I'm sorry to say these pictures don't do much justice to how awesome it was in person. The color balance is pretty off in most of them and I didn't get any pictures of the main structure because it was insanely crowded. It's alright though, I'll try to go back some time before I leave and get some pictures of the structure during the daytime.