大野山 hiking

Tired off my old backyard Miura peninsula, I packed up a sandwitch bag, tied up my hiking boots and set off to a bit of real countryside. That is, countryside so far removed as to be outside the range of the automatic ticket machines, and where you actually have to buy a paper train ticket from the conductor.

大野山 is a nice-sized hill about 2 hours West of Yokohama, and is famous for the view of Mt. Fuji from the top, the green pastures, and black and white cows.

The track is a pleasant 2 hours walking from he train station to the top, along beautiful forest tracks and small countryside roads. Wildlife was everywhere, with blue-tailed skinks darting into the undergrowth, huge lazy butterflies flitting around, large spotty-legged daddy-long-legs gracefuly meandering amidst the tree roots and, the paths being quite frequented, the giant spiders and even more humongous sticky webs were mainained at a safe distance from average head hight.

Nearly to the top, a small carved rabbit kindly informs visitors we have now reached 634m, the height of the Sky Tree, the tallest building in Japan.

And out you pop from the forests, into open pastures of knee-high lush grass and armies of red and blue libellula (or what wikipedia tells me are commonly called skimmers).

The view over the southern-most South Alps, to the North and East,

and over the plains surrounding Sagami Bay was breathtaking.

And there were, indeed, some black and white cows, although, like any sensible animal, they were engaged in a midday nap when I passed by.

hiking in the rain

It's like splashing your way along a sidewalk with your umbrella, but you do it on a forest trail. Tap dancing is not encouraged. Singing is fine, but it appears to bother the cicadas somewhat, and, as I soon found out, they have a tendancy to dive bomb anything that bothers them.

It felt good to get back up into the forests in central Miura peninsula, wading my way through exhuberant greenery. I haven't been hiking around here for so many months, it was almost a pleasure to get back into the cicada-infested woods, with flies, bees and mosquitoes zooming everywhere. I had, somehow, forgotten just how big the spiders get, and just how huge and sticky they think their webs needs to be. But then again, if they're planning to catch those 10-cm wingspan butterflied that flit around the underbrush, maybe big is better!

The rain, coming in fast and erratic downpours, gave quite a springy feel to it all. This was added to by the huge flocks of Japanese quail clucking around the forest floor. And believe me, these here quails have no trouble flying at all! Back to the biology books - part 1.

Another thing undoubtedly brought out by the rain was a sort of white, soft-looking crab. Now I've seen a few of these dead in streams, but this one was quite alive, and we must have been over a kilometer from the nearest stream at that point. Everyone knows of coconut crabs, but small forest crabs live in temperate forests? Back to the biology books -part2!

Other critters out on the move were about 5 herons, all fishing in the same stream, a big crow trying to eat a large red fresh-water crayfish that wasn't dead and was not giving in. I ended up staring at the crow till it went away, and last I saw of the crayfish was a swirl of murky water as it scuttled back under its tuft of grass. I also saw a snake who was having some difficulty with the slippery mud of the hillside, but as I was having a bit of trouble coping with the steep, slick path, I didn't stick around.

After 4 hours of tromping around, and still managing to get utterly lost, despite the numeroushikes I've done around there, I finally made my way back to the station, and to some drier clothes. The biology lessons can continue, though, as there is just as much wildlife around my room as in the forest, with huge batalions of cicadas in the trees, and this cute little gecko that came to look in the window at me.