Japan Times

Its kind of hard to think of it still being fall on this, the 30th day of November, but this year in Tokyo its still a true statement. The trees still have leaves, of many a hue and the weather is quite nice. Tomorrow's high is about 13C so I can't complain in the slightest. But what would fall be without taking a little time out to look at some of those beautifully coloured trees. While most people think of Tokyo as nothing but a sprawling megalopolis its pretty interesting to note that a lot of the surrounding countryside (which is still in the municipality of Tokyo) is really beautiful and about a million miles away from Harajuku, Shinjuku and the like, even though the actual distance is more like about 50 miles.

One of these beautiful escapes is Mt. Takao where I went last week. It's only one 45min - 1 hour train ride out of Shinjuku station, but its great. Unfortunately it gets pretty crowded on the weekend, but that's Japan. The leaves were pretty .. um.. pretty and I managed to get my hands on a massive pork bun near the top. Nothing says tasty like a hot meaty snack on a cold autumn day.

Another cool thing was that I was able to get a chance to see the legendary Mt. Fuji from on top of Mt. Takao. Mt. Takao is only about 300m tall, while Fuji is about 3000, so its still a pretty impressive sight. There were a bunch of people standing at the top of the mountain waiting to get a sweet picture of the sun setting behind Mt. Fuji, so I stayed and tried my hand at it too..

Speaking of sunset, there are two ways down the mountain, the cable car and the usual "one-foot-in-front-of-the-other" method. We chose the latter, which maybe wasn't the best idea, since we had stayed at the top to see the sun setting over Mt. Fuji. To make matters worse we took the narrowest, steepest, slipperiest route down in the hopes of seeing a waterfall that was next to the trail. (There were several signs posted saying that you should *not* try to go down this way since it was steep). Well with the light fading very quickly, and no flashlights, we made a bit of a mad dash down to the bottom before the rabid squirrels and zombie rabbits decided to take a stab at tearing into our flesh. Just as things were at their darkest (literally) we saw the light (literally) at the end of the tunnel. We made it down to the foot of the mountain where there were lampposts a plenty. All in all a good little afternoon.