Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Jimba-san

Louise here,

On Saturday I went mountain climbing with one of my adult English students, Setsuko Kimura, and two of her friends, Mr Tachikawa and Mr Taniyama. We climbed Jimba-san, an 857 m high mountain that is 40 minutes by bus from Takao station on the Keio Line.


At the bottom (L-R: Setsuko, moi, Mr Tachikawa, Mr Taniyama)


We climbed through a plantation cedar forest for two hours, trading Japanese and English sayings, like “I'm sweating a lot” and “It's slippery.”

On the way up


At the top we found an interesting statue of a horse (representing Jimba-san the mountain), a cafe selling noodles and ice desserts, many picnic tables, many people dressed in expensive hiking gear and an elusive view of Mt Fuji.


At the top


It's still civilisation if there's somewhere to buy dessert


We took a shorter way down and spent the time composing haiku and trading names for the wildlife we saw and heard, like 'higurashi cicada,' 'killer whale' (we didn't see that one) and 'SNAKE!'

On the way down (before the snake)

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