Saturday, May 06, 2006
Today we decided to continue our go-to-new-places drive by going up Mount Moiwa. This is the highest mountain within very easy reach of the city, and one that we always see from our place. There's a cablecar to the summit, but we decided to walk it. It's not very high (1742 feet/531 metres apparently), but high enough to get a good walk and very good views from the top.We started from near the bottom cablecar station, near a large hospital, where a fairly popular path starts. This particular path is lined with groups of statues similar to the Maruyama route we did on Monday , except as well as jizo there are also kannon (the many armed Buddhist "goddess"), at 33 points all together - this is one of the first groups near the bottom:
It was a nice walk, but it was a lot warmer today, so although there was not quite as much as snow as on Maruyama, there was a lot of mud...now we know why everyone was wearing all the waterproof boot covers that we so mocked at first. Where there was snow tended to be in quite treacherous places - especially in the picture on the right. At this point on the path I saw a couple of people slipping worryingly near the edge - a very steep plunge down into a pretty scarey gully - despite all their hiking gear and sticks.
About halfway up the trail there's a rest and viewing point at a place called the "horse's back" (uma-no-se), which I think is a popular name for that kind of point at the top of a ridge on Japanese mountains. From here we took the fork of the path that led up to the summit, which didn't take too long to reach. It was strange to be walking in natural surroundings for a while and then suddenly emerge at the top station of the cablecar complete with vending machines, car park, bus stop and a souvenir shop packed with Hokkaido goods. The view from the roof was really good though. In the picture, the very small-looking round hill on the left is Maruyama:
After going back to the horse's back we decided to avoid the treacherous gully and went back down a different way, which came out in Asahiyama park - one of the many places around Sapporo built to commemorate it's centennial year. We were able to see our building from there, surprisingly close, so then we managed to find an almost dead-straight route back.
It was a nice walk, but it was a lot warmer today, so although there was not quite as much as snow as on Maruyama, there was a lot of mud...now we know why everyone was wearing all the waterproof boot covers that we so mocked at first. Where there was snow tended to be in quite treacherous places - especially in the picture on the right. At this point on the path I saw a couple of people slipping worryingly near the edge - a very steep plunge down into a pretty scarey gully - despite all their hiking gear and sticks.About halfway up the trail there's a rest and viewing point at a place called the "horse's back" (uma-no-se), which I think is a popular name for that kind of point at the top of a ridge on Japanese mountains. From here we took the fork of the path that led up to the summit, which didn't take too long to reach. It was strange to be walking in natural surroundings for a while and then suddenly emerge at the top station of the cablecar complete with vending machines, car park, bus stop and a souvenir shop packed with Hokkaido goods. The view from the roof was really good though. In the picture, the very small-looking round hill on the left is Maruyama:
After going back to the horse's back we decided to avoid the treacherous gully and went back down a different way, which came out in Asahiyama park - one of the many places around Sapporo built to commemorate it's centennial year. We were able to see our building from there, surprisingly close, so then we managed to find an almost dead-straight route back.# posted by Phil T : 2:10 am
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