On Tuesday the 29th of May, Maria and I went to Takao Mountain to hike and check out temples. We took a train from Fuchinobe to Hachioji, and then the rest of the train switching escapes me. I left it to Maria, who has a hard time with travel directions occasionally. We left Fuchinobe at around noonish, and got there around 2 pm. The ride there was scenic, although we had to double back a few times.
The area around Takao-san (the mountain shall be further refered to as Takao-san, because that’s what it’s called) was very serene, minus the stores selling omiyage and food. While in Machida its buildings as far as the eye can see, in Takao, there’s lots of nature and its pretty damn nice. You just have to travel an hour and a half or so to get there.
We opted to pay for cable cars because it would take 3-4 hours to climb the thing to the top, and all the cool stuff was up top anyway.
Yeah, the cable cars was essentially like a ski lift. You sit, and if you didn’t want to die, you stayed in the seat. Real simple. The lift drops you off near the top, but low enough that you can hike up and feel like you actually suffered to see stuff.
I had already eaten a small cheese-mushroom thing at Excelsior Cafe near the Fuch, so Maria ate some onigiri. I do not know what kind of onigiri this is. Lunched entailed us banging our knees on tiny Japanese tables and me eating a bird seed-like seasoning out of a container. We got frozen treats afterwards and continued the ascent.
Lots of shrines and signs. I can’t read them at all, except for bits and pieces. Some trees have ropes and paper around them. After Maria told me that it meant they were sacred, the first thought that came to my mind was to defile them through urination. Don’t worry, I didn’t.
Lots of tengu statues on the mountain. And lots of shrines and temples. We checked out quite a few on the way to the top. I probably should’ve asked the significance of each one, but hell if I knew.
As with most jinjas, they usually sell charms, for getting into college or health or whatever. The thought came to me that if I bought charms as omiyage and handed them to friends, they probably wouldn’t know what the hell the charms were for. So I started looking for one of those easy/painless child birth ones. Since I am bad at Kanji, it was futile.
This building looked like a masoleum, and had a bunch of Buddha pictures on it. Maria made an interesting comment about how Shinto and Buddhist structures can stand together so closely without trouble, unlike Protestants and Catholics would probably murder each other if they were next door to each other (like Ireland, I think?).
We decended and went back to Machida. Best line of the day was perhaps spoken during the train ride:
Me: “Hey, I can read those Kanji! It says Japanese University of Culture!”
Maria: “You know now Japanese!”
Me: “… I know now Japanese? You know not English!”
Maria: “…”
After we got to Machida, we ate at La Pausa, a pretty decent Italian food place. It is also near the Hub, another plus. While we were waiting for the food to arrive, Maria and I rock paper scissors’ed to see who would have to drink out of the habanero sauce bottle. I won. She drank it and she spent a few minutes dying.
As usual, most of the pictures are on my Flickr. Go take a look!
I am gonna start typing up the past weekend’s activities in a little bit.
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