I love the fact that we live less than 5 minutes away from great hiking. We love going hiking up to Takatori Mountain. There are two ways to get to the top and we have been up both ways. We have made the Buddha route a couple of times now and wanted to try and explore past the top of the mountain down towards the other trails. Today we headed on a new trail that took us all the way towards Zushi. Before heading on the new trail we stopped at the top of Takatori Mountain to watch the rock climbers. There are so many great rocks to climb up there and we can't wait to get our own gear and get trained to climb so we can take the kids climbing with us. We are hoping to be good climbers by the time we leave here. It would be a shame to not take advantage of all the great climbing especially because it is pretty much in our backyard.
The first part of the trail took us down a steep cliff and then another steep section with chains. The kids thought that was pretty neat to have to hold onto the chains in order to get down safely. The kids told us that they felt like they were in the Indiana Jones movie. From there we wound up and down and around the most beautiful trail until we came to a man-made stone staircase that led us down to Jinmuji Temple and a monastery. We stopped and rested there as the kids were entertained by the donation box in front of the temple. Appartently the money had fallen out of the back of the box and they were just trying to "put the money back" into the box. We walked down yet more stairs to a row of Jizo statues wearing red hats and bibs. Just down the way we found a really neat bell which sat at the top of a small hill from where the monastery was. The view looking down towards the monastery was spectacular. I really wanted to go and take a closer look but it was blocked off to visitors.
The rest of our hike consisted of hiking down a trail that ran along a creek. There was no one around except us and it was such a peaceful hike all the way down. I stopped a few times to take some pictures and found myself quite alone in the woods which was really nice. At the end of the trail we headed towards the main road to Jinmuji station which is only one stop from one of the stations by our house. We even saw a few trees that were showing signs of spring with some beautiful white cherry blossoms. We are really looking forward to cherry blossom season this year. Now if it can only warm up a bit for March that would be great!
The pink highlighted line was the hike we took today!
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