Views on the trail

Today's trail was a bit fragmented. Walked through villages in the morning with short detours through forests, bamboo groves etc. but there was lots of fiddling around crossing roads and stuff.

One time went round the same hill twice and right near the end there was a long climb through a forest and half way up double checked the instructions, thought we were wrong and went all the way back down again only to find we were right first time and had to walk up it again! Argh!

Start of the second day hike

Up at 7 for traditional Japanese breakfast. Hot pan fried salmon, pickles, poached egg in soy sauce, miso soup, sticky rice with melted sesame miso, green veg, yoghurt, apple slices and coffee. Ate the lot which pretty much set us up for the day.

Set off from the lodgings soon after 8 and were waved off by the mother and daughter who run it and continued along the trail bound for Nojiri.

View is looking back to the village as we started to climb.

Guess what we had for dinner!

So the lady called us for dinner at 7 and we went up in our robes to the dining room where they had laid out for us a rather challenging feast. Can't remember everything but we were treated to preserved rainbow trout, cold sticky prawn dumplings, miso soup, frozen horse meat (and horse fat) sashimi, creamy shiitake mushroom dish cooked in a clay pot at the table, pickles, cold tempura with green tea dip and sticky rice. The crispy grasshoppers were delicious!!

Photo is view from our window.

Mountain lodgings

Descended from the pass though the best part of the trail along the snow covered valley. Arrived in the small mountain village of Tsumago. Lodgings really fab - very traditional so I'm sitting on our tatami matting now catching up on my blog and Brian is playing Angry Birds in our robes just like the ancient Japanese did!

Waiting for dinner to be cooked and then a relaxing bath and an early night so we will be fresh for the full days walking tomorrow - bliss :)

The Magome Pass - at last!

So my map reading skills are fallible after all - got within 100m of the pass over the mountains and got confused with the directions and had to back track down the steepest part of the hike to get our bearings again only to find we were right after all. Pah!

The trail down the other side went through the most fab snow covered valley. We specifically didn't ring the bear bells which are there to ward them off as we were hoping for a close encounter - no such luck though :(

A meditation

It's amazing the inspiration which comes on the ancient trail. It occurred to me that in years gone by these were the very same steps that my friend Ann climbed when she came on holiday to Japan!

Ok let's start walking then

So this is the start of the trail. The bus climbed up though the mountains and into the snow - nice :)