Two friends and I have been trying to go on a hike since April. Derailed multiple times by sniffles and bad weather, we finally dragged ourselves out last weekend to enjoy fog, trees, and weird (non-human eating) bugs.
Moths and beetles and cicadas and bees, and only one mosquito! Well, only one that I saw, AND I killed before it could get to me. Take that, vampire bugs!
I say “in nature,” but really, this is still Japan. Mount Kumotori borders three prefectures – Saitama, Yamanashi, and. .. yeah. Three. (Wikipedia tells me the third is the ever-elusive Tokyo. Sounds kinda familiar, Tokyo..) Apparently it’s part of the Chichibu Tama-kai national park. Right. So after a 1.5 hour an express train to Chichibu station + one hour bus ride, we started our hike at Mitsumine Shrine. The path was nicely maintained, but real enough that only twice did hissing cars replacing chattering (noisy!) birds to remind us we really weren’t that far into anywhere.
Tokyo is alternating between muggy rain and muggy heat these days, so the cool mountain air was all the more a treat. With the smell of warm cypress and damp leaf, I could feel the gray city grit being flushed out by clean fog and the translucent green of backlit trees. There were weird mushrooms too, lots of ’em.
We stopped at one little shack two hours in, where the elderly male proprietor was selling bottles of water for 400 yen each. Eek! (The vending machines at the shrine sold them for 150 yen.) That was about halfway to the actual mountain top. To reach that, we probably would have needed to stay in Chichibu the night before, and get an earlier start.
Back at the bottom, we checked out the shrine while we waited for the return bus. Mitsumine Shrine itself was a little odd – very colorful for an isolated shrine; a little reminiscent of the flashier Taiwanese or Chinese temples than a Japanese one. The donation box was lined on either side by fortunes of all kinds – by blood type, straight up, by age, gender…I grabbed a blood type one, but have been too lazy to decipher so far. Supposedly there was a bathhouse there too, but we couldn’t find signs to it anywhere.
This being Japan though, on the bus ride back we stopped at another, better advertised onsen.  After a hot soak, some cold milk and koala yummies, life was looking good.  That, and some spicy onion (think shredded green onions) ramen at the station before the train, put me into a pretty solid state of happy.
Slept very soundly on the train back. (The local train in Chichibu is totally old school. They even have the “Paleo,” a coal/steam engine that runs during the day.
