Still Climbing

It was a totally cloudy day until just at sunset, when the curtain lifted just enough to let Mt. Fuji take a small bow.

I eventually did find the trail from Akiya to Koyasu, the village of small farms that takes you back a century. It starts at the end of the road that runs just across the street from the local convenience store. You climb a little bit, and then you're halfway up a hill that climbs and climbs and climbs, straight up to the top and then descends into the farm area of Koyasu. A round trip takes a few hours, but the trail is a beauty. I'm convinced it's been around since the Kamakura Period (around the 13th century), since they've found kilns from that period here, and the path has worn so deep even as it follows the ridge, that it has to have been worn down from many years of feet. Amazingly enough, there are still a very few very hidden fields at the top that are still being cultivated somehow. Most of them can be reached only by ignoring ropes and climbing over ditches (which my friend Ben and I did to every hint of a path off the main trail.) Unfortunately, I have no pictures, despite the fact that I've walked it three or four times now. It makes a perfect morning of exercise and there's the added benefit of buying some unusual vegetable or fruit from the farmers at the end of the hike.

A few days after the hike with Ben, I decided to take on another trail, this one leading off the road right behind our house. You leave the beach, go up 100 meters, take a turn and Wham. You're on a goat path that hugs the side of the hills and twists and turns through clusters of bamboo and overgrown weeds. There were a few places where the path was so narrow on the hillside I was sure I was going to slide right off. This is not an old trail like the other; no farm fields anywhere and the trail itself disappeared several times for short distances until disappearing for good just as I got over the peak. The bamboo grove was so thick with old bamboo stalks that I was just crunching my way through it until I literally tripped off the side of a wall covered in vines that was part of a larger construction.

All I had was my phone with me, so the photo quality is pretty bad, but if this isn't an Indiana Jones set, I don't know what is.

These hills look out over the sea. On the other side of the hills behind us is Yokosuka, the sea port which was a big port for the Japanese Navy. It now hosts both the Japanese and US Navies.

I'm just guessing, but it sure looks like it was once a gun emplacement and a bunker. It's built into the earth, and had several rooms, with steps leading up to the top. Very cool, very Indiana Jones-ish. And even though I walked a circuitous route around it, I still couldn't find a trail that would lead down off the other side of the mountain. So I had to walk back on the "goat path," which was even trickier going down. Next time I'll try going up from the other side and see if it leads to the same place.

 

And another shot of something from the past, though more recent. This is a cross section of the (former) middle lobe of my right lung, with the cancerous tumor in white.  And no, that's not the color of my lung. It was pink when they took it out, since I've been off cigarettes for 18 years now. But whatever they use to pickle it in turned it a dark brown. I'm hoping that's the last I'll see of this nasty little bugger, though I'd imagined a much scarier-looking caricature of a tumor.