Hiking with the spaniards!

so,
man, I always start my blogs with "so", but thats realy how i talk, ..."so here we go". last thursday we had a big plan to hike yabaguchi-ko, a hiking trail off in the wilds of the Biwako lake area. Its a really nice hike that is rated as one of the best to do in the kansai area. We didn't complete the hike, but had alot of fun on the parts of the hike that we did do.

The day started out really early/late, depending wich way you look at the situation. We were still sitting at the 280 pub at 1 am the morning of the hike. So needless to say i was the crankiest person in Kansai the morning of our big adventure! we got to umeda at about 730, and met fernando there. Fernando is a traveling backpacker from mexico city. He has tons of crazy stories that you think are tall tales and fabricated lies, but then he has crazy pictures to back up all the madness. Luck follows him every where and hes traveled to tibet, china, bits and peices of asia and is now backpacking through japan. we wish him luck on his seoul section of his trip, and are glad we ran into him at the 280.

We also went with our fellow nova work and photograpy friend "laura". shes super nice and from spain. She met us at umeda and then we headed out to catch the train to Takashima station in shige prefecture. the station we arrived at was pretty bland and rickety, but the main draw to the town was the HUGE statue of gulliver, as in Gulliver from gullivers travels. It was massive and was pulling these little broze replicas of lilliput ships with little bronze lilliputters in them.

The train station immediatly reminded me of being back home in canada, because as most canadians can attest, in canada small towns always have some big/weird claim to fame. eg) veggriville (huge pysanka egg), drumheller ( big dinosaur), random alberta town ( some big statue of something meaningless but oddly intersting)

takashima is no different, and i liked it immediatly. we got there a little off scedule, so we had to wait 2 hrs for the bus to take us to the foot of the mountain wich was another town called kurono. to kill time we walked around the town, wich starangely had no conveinience stores, (no family mart, nothing...strange) . We walked down by the coast, and i thought i was a rope lying on the rocks, but it was a huge snake! we trekked around for a bit, then made our way back to the bus station.

On the bus ride to the hike, my favorite japanese encounter happened. it was between us an a sweet old obachan(granny) While on the bus to kurono, we were all sitting at the very back an old lady came and sat right infront of us. she was pretty preoccupied with getting her bags settled into the seat and seating her self she didint realize a whole row of foreiners sitting right behiend her.

when she did turn around, she was so startled to see all these gailin faces staring at her she yelled "bikuri" and then appologized right away for saying bikuri and was so embarrased. ps ( bikuri-means SUPRISE, or wow, i didn't see that coming)in japanese).

The hike was great, we got lost a few times and had to back track and start from the begginng, but we all had a good laugh about it every time we got to the "rocky wash that goes down to meet the river" this was a contencious spot of the hike we couldn't really find. but Shiv was really proud of me because i am deathly afraid of bugs , especially butterflys, and moths and flying bugs. And our hike was full of flying bugs and snakes, and i didn't flip out 1/2 as much as he thought i would.
Yeah!!

For parts of the hike we were scaling boulders like in movie, i felt like a conquistadora (woman conquering a new world!) it was such an amazing feeling to be doing such a hard climb, it was tough and strenuous, but empowering at the same time.

it started to get dark so we decided to turn back on the trail, but not before our spanish hikers decided to take a mountain waterfall bath in the buff, me and shiv (being canadian prudes) stood in our clothes and ate raisins in the forest. Oh the spanish, they are light years beyond us in terms of body image and self counciousness.

when we got back to Osaka, we were so hungry we went for okonomiyaki (osaka squid pancake) so good, dont knock it till you try it! and watched a super good jazz band play at umeda station.
Great day, thanks to the compnay.!