The Yamanobe-no-Michi: The Worst "Greatest Decision Ever" Part II

Continuing from where we left off, my traveling companions, John, Peter, Kristin, Steven and I left the lake in the early hours of dusk with renewed spirits, unaware our journey was barely half over. Our path skirted the mountains for a bit and then turned into the foothills. This was a part of the trip that truly encapsulated the essence of hiking. Shortly into the forest, the trees quickly turned to bamboo and we quickly found ourselves in the setting of an samurai movie, with the take lining the path seemed to give off a glow that had us in awe. It was the second most beautiful scene we would have on this experience.

After we left the bamboo forest, we found ourself at someone's home that also served as a rather grande local shrine. We saw a monk tending to the shrine and we approached him to ask for directions as we were quite sure we were lost at this point. We hadn't seen a sign or trail marking for quite some time and were basically following what could have been any mountain path leading away from that lake. We spoke in very broken Japanese that we were trying to get to Nara to our hostel. When he heard Nara, he said in English, "Ooh, very far." Not exactly the most encouraging thing to hear after several hours of hiking.

The monk was able to give us directions to get back to the correct trail and wished us luck as he sent us on our way. At this point, it became less of a mountain trail and was more of walking on paved roads past rice paddy upon rice paddy seeing only the occasional local tending the field. We kept along the roads and followed signs we managed to make out were for the Yamanobe-no-Michi. After close to another hour of walking, we saw a train station and debated on hopping on the rails and getting back to Nara station. We must have been delirious at this point because we reasoned that we were so close to Nara and backing out now would delegitimize our accomplishment.

We had agreed that despite our struggles, we would never let our other program members know. As far as they were concerned, this was the greatest decision ever and we regret nothing. And so we sojourned on, continuing along seemingly endless fields of rice until we finally saw the fringes of the city on the horizon. We prematurely started celebrating the close-at-hand end of our travels. I say prematurely because once we reached the city limits, we encountered a sign saying it would be another four kilometers to the side of the city that our hostel was in. At this point we were stopped by a passerby biker asking us the standard 'where are you from? what are you doing? where are you going?' questions. And again, much to our chagrin, he answered us with "ooh, very far." We were polite in conveying our disappointment and after thanking the biker for his inquiry, we parted ways and continued on.

Shortly we finally reached the oasis, an open Lawson's convenience store. Myself being particularly low on money at the time, Kristin being the generous person that she is agreed to split her gallon of water with me. I nearly cried tears of joy when my thirst was quenched as I had ran out of water much earlier than anticipated on the trip. Between the two of us we quickly downed nearly three-fourths of the bottle almost instantly. At this point we all had to focus on ignoring the throbbing in our feet and exhaustion in the rest of our bodies and soldiered on to the other side of the city.

We started to reach areas of town that looked somewhat familiar and finally stumbled upon signs leading to Nara station, aka our landmark to find our hostel. We arrived at our hostel shortly before 9 p.m. and had to stop ourselves from completely collapsing in heaps on the floor. The first thing we all did was relax in the bath and then we gathered in the cafeteria to feast on our bread reserves and down a couple cold beers before calling it a night. We regaled our fellow students with tales of our travels, of course embellishing a bit so that they would be green with envy. Our exhaustion quickly got the better of us though and we retired to our futons right around 10 p.m., quickly passing out for the day.

Useful phrase in this week's post:

take - たけ - 竹

meaning: bamboo