Through the Graveyard and Back to Tokyo

I wanted to start off today's blog with a picture of the steep pitch of the road we had already taken up the mountain. We left Zeniarai Benten and continued up the road to a new set of mountain ridges. At the top of the ridge, the trail split. We could get back to town either way, but the fork to the right was a little long than the fork to the left according to our map. I'm not sure if that really means much since the map wasn't scaled at all. In fact, on the first journey through the woods, we apparently went off the map. A Japanese gentleman working on his yard helped us draw in the missing piece of the map, and he got us back on track.  The map also gave us a few big roads, but the detail was horrid. We had learned to use the map as a general guide, not as the definitive source on distance or roads.


Our real dilemma was how to make best of the time we had left. Additionally, the heat, distance we had walked and humidity had an effect on the team. Rick had become a little dehydrated earlier in the day, and had a charlie horse in his calf.  Rick's problem wasn't due to lack of fitness, but a lack of water. None of us had hit the restrooms all day because we were seating any water we were drinking out of our bodies.  Our real problem was time. We didn't want to miss the last train out, and we still wanted time to hit a couple more sites. Our initial decision was to go left, but we saw a clearing off to the right, and we wanted a good shot from the mountain tops. The clearing didn't provide a good view of the mountain side, but it did provide us with a placid garden with a large Buddha at it's heart.

We were still looking for that magic spot to get a picture, and we never went back to the left trail. I guess you can say we were inspired by Buddha. Not far from the Buddha statue, we found our best view of the day.

You can see from the picture, we're a pretty good ways up. We weren't the height of the Rockies or Cascades of course, but definitely at the altitude of the Appalachains. I would have loved a cloudless day to spy a view of Fuji from this height, but it wasn't to be. We didn't stay at our view long before we started back down the mountain.

We trudged down the mountain and approached our first graveyard. At this point, we didn't realize how big the grave yard was. We thought we had found a unique area embedded on the side of the mountain. We grabbed our cameras to click a few pictures.

Each stone is called a Haka and is typically owned by a family. This means there can be multiple generations of Japanese that were cremated and buried at the plot. The wooden boards behind the Haka are the names of individuals how have been interned in the small crypt of ashes below the Haka. Because of the lack of space in Japan and the cost of these plots, some Japanese are spreading their ashes elsewhere.

A gentleman at the Buddha garden told us to make sure you follow the path that goes straight, and  it will get very small, then open up again. When we left the graveyard it did just that. What he didn't tell us is that the trail becomes very tricky to navigate since the there was a significant drop with a cool canal excavated by thousands of years of erosion from water. Everyone who knows me can understand the challenge this was on my ankles. I made it down without a single collapse of the rubber band ligaments holding my feet together.

The trail continued through what we had realized was a large cemetery. It was a strange way to come out of the mountains, and the chirp of the crickets provided an eire peace to the area.It wasn't hard making our way out of the graveyard onto the small streets of Kamakura.