Last winter I chickened out and got out of Kyoto a few times with stops in the USA, Cairo, and Malaysia. This winter, I am being brave and staying here the whole winter. It will be my first complete winter in years and years!
All of my apartment windows are opaque, so I don’t see the weather until I open the door to check. This morning I got a nice surprise and a fun ride to the lab. Yay for snow!
My PhD has started a new phase. I am now preparing my data for analysis. The first step is to transcribe the 39-plus hours of interviews. I am using a software called Transcriva. The process is slow and tedious but its nice to make tangible progress. Several websites mention that it can take 4 to 7 hours to transcribe each hour of interview data. Mine are taking about 3 hours per hour of interview. My great field-assistant, Chai Ming, is helping with the Chinese and Malay interviews.
So, I took a break on Sunday and went for my yoga class (taught by my neighbor, Yoko) and then a hike up Kyoto’s second-highest peak, Mt Atago. Yoko’s boyfriend, Dan, wanted to visit an abandoned cable car station at the top of Mt Atago, near the much-more-famous shrine, also at the top.
Yoga was from 10:30 to 11:30, then I had a nice lunch with Yoko and Dan before we rushed to catch the bus to get to the trail head. It was a bit of a late start so we packed some extra warm clothes, snacks, and flashlights and head lamps, just in case. The bus got us to the trail-head just after 2 pm and we started right up the hill at a blistering pace. It is about a 4 km walk with an approximate 600 m vertical climb. Both of us have climbed to the shrine before, but not to the cable car station. We had to be quick and we weren’t sure where the old cable car was so we wanted time to be able to find it.
This is the yoga space. Its a loft above a cafe. We can enjoy the smells of the cafe cooking while trying to focus on the activity!
But…… I had my binoculars and there were birds. So it went a bit slow at times. At the very start of the trail there was a bird wave and we saw some pretty common birds but one stood out and I managed to identify it later as a Siberian ruby throat – (update 13 March. It wasn’t Siberian rubythroat. It was Red-breasted flycatcher. Not quite as rare but still very cool) a lifer for the start of the hike. Yeah! We also saw a woodpecker that I may have seen before, but am not sure.
There were lots of climbers coming down and we got overtaken by one guy who was running up (he passed us coming down later on). As we neared the top it was getting close to 5 pm. Our return bus was at 6:38, so figured that we needed to turn around near 5.
When we were nearly at the top a group of three young men were coming down and Dan (who speaks better Japanese than me but still not a lot) stopped to ask them if they knew where to find the cable car. Their English was not great but they indicated that they were looking for the same thing but they didn’t seem to be able to tell us. We gave up and went up to the top of the shrine and made ourselves a quick cup of tea and headed back down…. at 5:15 pm. We needed to hurry.
These guys were friendly but couldn’t tell us where the ruin was.
As we went back down the trail we noticed something on the ground. An arrow pointing to a small side trail. And above it, written with cedar leaves was the word – RUIN! Dan spotted the word. I completely missed it. The guys had left us a message.
The sign! Clever guys! Can you see “ruin” just above the arrow?
Despite the lateness (and some pain I was having in my hip from yoga and the climb) we rushed down the side trail to see if we could find it. Dan was faster and ran ahead…. and there it was! The abandoned building! What a find!
We spent a few minutes looking around. Dan wondered if we should go straight down the old cable car route but we decided it was best to take the trail. We rushed back to the trail. Now 5:30ish. We had an hour to get down and catch the bus. By then my hip was hurting. Dan was faster than me but we scurried down the trail. At 6:15 it was dark and the head lamps came out. We continued to scurry. Dan phoned Yoko and found out that there was another bus at 7:00 but it would only get us to the nearest town and not all the way into Kyoto. We would need to find another transport back in – either bus or train.
The trail down… it got much, much darker!
At 6:30 we hit pavement at the bottom of the valley and the road. Dan jogged back up the little hill to the bus stop. My hip was burning and I tried to go as fast as I could. When I reached the bus stop, Dan was there and we had missed the bus by 5 minutes. Boo! So we waited for the 7 pm bus. And reveled in the rush of having gone up and down so fast and the wonder that the guys had left us that cool message.
And then out of the darkness the 3 guys came up the hill! They had gone down the cable car route! We were so happy to meet them. We showed them pictures of their trail sign and the building. They were all law students at Osaka City University and one Spring Break. We all caught the same bus and had a nice chat on the way.
We met up with the guys who helped us find the ruin! Thanks guys! (photo: Dan Marsh)
Dan and I went back to get our bikes and stopped for some yakitori and a couple of beers. I didn’t get any transcriptions done on that Sunday but it was memorable and fun. I doubled up on the transcriptions on Monday.
Posted in Birding, Japan, PhD Studies
Tagged Abandoned Kansai, Kyoto, Mt Atago, Siberian ruby throat, yakitori
I try not to make a big deal out of typos and misspellings when people write English. But that doesn’t mean that some of the signs don’t make me smile. These three deserve special mention. One shop sign and two apartment building names:
I kept my ass port to myself.
Post Coitus. Would Sheldon live here?
Classy font. Classy name. Maison de LIbido.
Weightless in the World 