Shizuoka (静岡市)

So we've had a bit of a "long distance, short distance" trip alternation going for basically the last week. Yesterday we broke the pattern by having stayed in Osaka the day after we went "short distance" to Kobe the previous day. The primary reason for this was that the forecast was threatening with a lot of rain for Shizuoka. It didn't threaten any less for Saturday but we had some hope that we might be able to get it to change its mind by holding up The Umbrella. It didn't look promising while we were on the train ...

By the time we arrived though, the rain did indeed appear to have stopped. What didn't disappear was the clouds. Which was a bit annoying as the primary reason for traveling here was to try and get a glimpse of Fuji-san. Looking at the aviation forecast (because they like being precise about clouds), it said that Shizuoka airport had broken clouds at 8'000ft. Fuji-san is at 12'000ft. But broken clouds could have gaps in them? A webcam said: no. And to be honest, so did any attempts to try and view it from the ground. So we decided to skip the hour long bus ride to a hill which might have had a spectacular view in better conditions.

But while my travel companions may have been deterred, I kept on seeing something on the horizon and started trying to find a gap in the cityscape in a desperate attempt to see what was actually visible. After that kept on failing (every time I got past one set of buildings, the city provided a new set of buildings to block my view) I found myself a mountain on the map with a potential walking trail and walked in that direction.

And boy was that a roller coaster. The path up started from behind a temple, with about 200 well paved steps. And once you got past the little shrine past that it ... very quickly became a far less paved path. Not to be deterred, and with the encouragement of the occasional person walking in the opposite direction, I kept going. In the end, I went through a larger range of things than I ever would have expected on a walk.

After the path initially turned into just a normal dirt path with low leaves, at some point it turned back into a paved path with beautifully maintained flower beds next to it. Then back to a dirt path and going through what looks like private land patches where people ... grow stuff? Or used to? I couldn't quite work out whether it was actually in use given that I didn't see anything active being grown, but one of the fenced areas did have a wall clock with an accurate time. And I can't imagine that the battery could have been more than a couple years old and still work.

Eventually I also saw remnants of an old monorail cargo network. Some of the old carriages and motors even still appeared to be around, though I don't think any of them had moved in quite a while. In fact, a lot of things started to look quite post-apocalyptic. Including the road that I used to walk back down off the mountain.

All in all though, it was a very interesting path. It would have continued for another two hours north if I would have had the supplies and time, but at the same time I was quite happy to find my way to civilization. It was never particularly far in that I could always see it off of both sides of the walk, with a nice gap in the treeline roughly every 20 minutes. But then also disappearing again as you continue on a path that quite obviously had at least 30 years worth of growth on it since it was created.

After getting back to civilization again, I was a little unimpressed with the only transportation network being bus', a transportation method that is impossible to figure out even when I do speak the language. I don't fully understand why none of these bus networks ever release a full map of their network so that you can figure out what number bus you want, or an ability to see the timetable for a stop without being physically at the spot. Google Maps tries to solve all of this "through technology" but ended up leading me to a spot that didn't have anything that remotely looked like a bus stop, and also never had anything arriving at the designated time. So I kind of just fell back to the trusty transportation method of undoing my last 2.5 hours worth of progress through yet more walking.