It was a long and treacherous journey

Hey all. It's been a while hasn't it? Shall I regale you with more tales of my Japanese mis-adventures?

Probably about a month ago now, we once again went to Nara, Japan's oldest (old school!) capital. My history is pretty bad so you'll have to take this with a grain of salt. From what I understand, Nara was the original capital but had to be moved many times (eventually settling in Tokyo) because of all the wars and such.

As such, Nara is a place rich with history and filled to the brim with shrines and temples. If you want to get your shrine and temple on, you can do it there. There's some ridiculous amount of UNESCO sites, so you know it's good. :)



One such place of beauty is Ikoma Mountain. To get to the top, you need to ride the cable car. There's about 5 stops on the way up and it's cool to slowly have the skyline revealed to you as you go up. As I'm sure many are aware, the Japanese are quite...wacky. The picture you see above is the cable car we had to ride in. There's another one that's decked out like a cat that will meow as it passes the dog one (it's on the opposite track). There's also a pink one which look like Strawberry Shortcake's personal cable car, plastered with cakes, cookies and candies of the plastic variety on the outside of her ride.

After you reach the first stop you have to switch cars to go up the rest of the way. The good thing is, there's actually some shops and a shrine there for you to check out while you wait for the next car up. The best word I can think of to describe the place is quaint. It's incredibly quiet up there, very traditional and the narrow "streets" are lined with houses and the occasional store or restaurant. Suffice to say at this point on the mountain, the view is pretty spectacular. I'll let the pictures do the talking from here on out.

Leading up to the shrine there's a ton of stairs. If theres one thing that irks me about Japan it's the sheer number of stairs everywhere. Normally I wouldn't care, but seeing as how I'm an out of shape bastard, it kinda sucks. :P It's free excercise?



Here's Val, victory style. Those stairs are a biatch.



Here's yet more steps leading up to the shrine. Kinda like something out of an old samurai movie...you half expect to be ambushed by ninjas. Or I'm just crazy.


The 180 view from said steps. Pretty cool huh?


This picture and the next one were taken from somebody's backyard. Well, behind someone's house. The way the houses were built on the mountain there's these huge concrete steps behind people's houses that aren't really meant for climbing. Guess who went climbing? ;)


Here's another shot. I was pretty pleased with the way these turned out. I'm just a sucker for city scapes I suppose. It's interesting seeing it from this angle as usually you'd expect the skyline filled with huge skyscrapers.

By the time we got to the top of the mountain we were surrounded by pure darkness. From what we could see, there was a theme park of sorts for the little chillun. It was closed, but seeing it all empty in the dark gave it a really creepy vibe. I took some other pics of the night lights, but we were too far up to get anything that's worthwhile to post.

That's all for now. The next post should be about our visit to Todaiji temple and Nara Park. Stay Tuned!