Hiking FAIL

The language barrier has seldom made travel noticeably more difficult in Japan.  When your IPhone is basically a GPS and can even plan complicated train routes out for you, in English, via an app, there are usually no worries when we venture out.

Usually.

However, when you are hiking in an area that doesn't get cell service, and it's been hours since you've seen another hiker, and the trail signs suddenly stop being bilingual - well, it's good motivation to get more familiar with kanji.

We had decided to spend Saturday hiking from one mountain which I had already been to, and was pretty familiar with,  to another peak nearby.  At the base of this mountain, there was another train station which we could use to get back home.  So we set off, passing at least ten trail signs on our way which had Japanese as well as English directions.  After about 2 1/2 hours, we reached an intersection at the top of the hill which was entirely in Japanese.  My dear husband voted for turning back and retracing our steps to where we started, so we could take the same train home.  I, however, am prideful, and was not about to admit defeat.  I mean, we had reached the top, right?  All downhill from here.  Surely we could figure this out.  There were only three options as far as trails went!

So we checked out the first option - pretty quickly we got the feeling that this was not the way to go.  The trail was very pretty but also very overgrown, it was obvious that it had not seen a lot of foot traffic recently.  It also appeared to be quite level for a long ways, not the descent we were looking for.  Thus, we went the other direction, and out of the two choices offered that way, we took the one that headed straight down the hill.  At this point, we didn't have a lot of daylight left, and this seemed the surest way to get back to a town, as we could see that it lead down to the river, and we could hear some kind of bell tower ringing in that direction.

Basically I had a 1/3 chance of it leading down to the station we were looking for, and it seemed like a smart choice.  Apparently not.  After a brutally steep descent, we popped out on a rural road which intersected the trail.  By this time we were able to get cell service, and find out where we were.  It was not the town we were looking for.  They didn't even have a train station.  To get home, we would have had to power- walk for four hours.  However, we were a mere two hours' walk from the closest train station, and were able to get home by a decent hour.    In retrospect, the trail that looked like it hadn't been used in ages probably would have been a better choice.

We ended up walking like 15 miles at least that day.  We were so tired, but I will say it was not as much of a pain as I made it sound.  The weather was nice, we saw some awesome views, and spending the day out in the mountains was great.  The forests hear are really verdant, especially with all the rainfall right now, and even our walk through a couple of rural towns was pretty decent.  Despite the fact that our legs were about ready to fall off.

I have a feeling that next time, my better half will be doing the navigating.  :)