Adventures in Japan

Four Calling Birds

Where the heck did we go today? They had it on signs all over the freaking place, but now I can't remember it. Wait... we were in Kotohira, but the signs all had "Kompira" on them. Yeah. This place never makes any sense to me either. Kotohira is famous for having a lot of stairs.


Seriously.


And we climbed all of them.


In the rain.


You know what we had for dinner last night? Udon noodle soup. Know what we had for breakfast? Udon. Lunch? Udon. Know what's tasty? Udon.


It was misty all morning. And it just kept getting mistier and mistier the higher up the mountain we climbed. We climbed fairly high.

Here are some pictures from about the halfway mark of our trek up the mountain. This is a picture of some binoculars that people use to take in the beautiful views afforded them:


This is a handy dandy picto-map explaining just what all of that vastness before you is:


This is the view (note the edge of the picto-map in the lower corner, just to show I ain't no leg puller):


I don't think you get just how misty it was. It was so totally misty.


These girls were just a couple seconds ahead of us. When they passed us, one girl said "Haro!" followed by "I'm tired!"


You still just don't get it, do you? The mistiness? Here is a video of Carla going for a walk in the mist.


She was never seen again.

Carla and I made it up to the top, looked around, said hello to all the people who had passed us, took pictures that looked mainly like this:



Geddit? It's all white! We took our pictures and then went back down the mountain. The going down seemed to go way quicker than the going up. Odd, that.

After all that we ate some udon, shopped for tchotchkes and took a tour of a sake brewery. Then we went to an izakaya that served locally brewed beers. For a country that drinks as much as Japan, they really don't have a lot of microbreweries.