Kumotori-yama

Just wanted to tell you a bit about the trip...
Akira, Jan and me took the 5:29 train from Hitachinoushiku and arrived in Ikebukuro at 6:39. About two minutes later Masumi called from home to tell us that she had overslept. (I think somebody is building a reputation here !) So instead of the 6:50 express train we took the one at 7:30 which was not really so bad, only that instead of having direct connections at Seibu-Chichibu and Mitsumineguchi we now had to wait more than half an hour at each station.

We had a nice chance to watch the swallows feeding their offspring at Mitsumineguchi Eki, though. (Pictures !)
The non-ropeway option was pretty much out of the question at this time, after the ascent and a quick visit to the shrine it was about 11:20 before we finally got going, quite late considering we had got up at four. After the heavy rain on Friday and on early Saturday morning, it stopped raining around 9am just as predicted. For a moment at least. Luckily the rain was only rather light during our ascent to the hut, but the trails were pretty muddy. The highlight of the first day definitely were the deer on Shiwairayama. They came extremely close and virtually let themselves be hand-fed. Masumi and one of the deer only got to about two metres of each other, then the deer twiched a bit, Masumi
twitched a bit more and they leapt away from each other.

The pictures of the deer were not taken with a zoom lens, by the way.
We reached Kumotoriyama Sensou just before 5pm after a leisurely (read: all four of us were pretty unfit) walk just under map time, looking a bit as if we had taken part in a mud wrestling competition.

In the evening we played the German board game 'Die Siedler von Catan' that Jan had carried up the mountain while drinking the beer we had made Masumi pay for making us wait in the station.
The next morning we climbed the final 30 minutes to Kumotoriyama that defied its name: although there was a solid cloud cover below 1800 meters, the summit of Kumotoriyama was sunny and we had a beautiful view of still snow-covered Fujisan.

The descent was a bit depressing as we dove back into the clouds rather soon and stayed there for the rest of the trip. (Remind me to discuss his definition of 'basically just downhill' with Paul on Wednesday !)
We got slightly worried when some people that we talked to on the summit told us that it had taken them about 13 hours to walk from the Kumotoriyama hut to Okutama Eki, the map time was only about seven hours and we had planned to make it in that time.

In the end it took us slightly under eight hours including some generous breaks, so those people must have done something seriously wrong. There was light rain again a large part of the way down from Kumotoriyama, especially on the final mudslide down the ridge.
When we had finally reached the road leading to Okutama we heard a thunderstorm close by, but we made it into the onsen before the downpour started. (The guys actually had to wait for half an hour before getting in because it was so crowded.)
We ended the trip with a nice dinner in an Italian restaurant in Shinjuku (I am still surprised they let me in with my mud-crusted hiking pants). I am not sure whether we successfully scared Paul into believing that we got lost ("Paul ! Paul ! It's getting dark and we lost the way ! Do you know the number of the mountain rescue ?!").

probably the guy singing "O sole mio" was too loud.