Mt. Akagi

Yesterday I finally did a decent exploration of Mt. Akagi, which is the most famous mountain in the area. On a really clear day, supposedly you can even see Mt. Fuji from the top of Mt. Akagi. Yesterday wasn't quite that clear, but it was really nice.

I went up with Natsumi, and it was a kind of strange experience, because the only time i'd been up before was during the winter when the lake at the top was frozen over and I went sledding with my host family. The whole feeling was completely different.

The biggest bummer is that my camera's batteries ran out after one picture. That's a real shitter. There were all sorts of cool things to take pictures of... and every time i couldn't, it was like a fissure in my ass. There's a little island in the middle of the lake and there was some sort of ceremony going on where they were putting out hundreds and hundreds of paper boats into the water. We couldn't quite figure out what it was for though. Even though Natsumi asked. But they were nice enough to let us launch a couple of boats ourselves. Mine capsized.

Then we fed some Koi. I haven't done anything like that for a long time... they were mostly ugly black Koi, but there were a couple of pretty white, orange, and mixed white/orange ones. You can also play carnival-style games, with the dozens of open Koi mouths as your goal, and the little pellets as the ping pong balls. I made a couple of sweet shots.

On the back of the mountain there's a REALLY steep stairway... it ends kind of abruptly, but there's a really nice view over the village down below (which you can walk down to on normal paths if you want to) and other mountains off in the distance. Along the stairwell, there's a little weak looking rail with a tiny cart attatched to it at the top. It looks like it's actually designed to be ridden down, but anyone who would do such a thing would have to be out of their mind... but it did look fun in an Indiana Jones sort of way.

Finally we hit the killer... you know on kid's playgrounds those "roller slides" where you go down a couple of feet on what basically amounts to spinning poles (lined up horizontally of course)? They kind of hurt your ass and you can never quite figure out why they put them on big toys in the first place? Well, there's a 300 meter long one of those somewhere up on the top of Mt. Akagi. For some reason we decided to ride it, and you're basically left with 2 choices: 1) Ride down squatting on your feet in a kind of extreme skiing position, or 2) Ride down on your ass, like everyone else. There are problems with both of course. 1) You get going really fast and you're pretty likely to eat shit as the only thing to use for brakes are your bear hands and metal poles on the sides. 2) Unless you have lots of padding, it's gonna hurt your ass. I went for a mix of the two, and ended up eating shit and burning my ass. You think I'm joking, but your ass is literally hot after going down that thing. After you finish, it's not an altogether unpleasant sensation though. It lasted for about 10 minutes. 10 minutes of hot-ass. hmm... seems like I should be able to make a bad joke out of that.