My First Trip to Shosenkyo Gorge

OK I am going to write a little bit about our trip to Shosenkyo.  Not much.  This weekend is Tokyo so I will have more adventures to write about on Monday.

We took a 40 minute ride on a regular city bus (which cost $8) to get to the gorge.  On the ride up there I decided that I wanted to live in the mountains.  I would seriously have attempted to find an apartment (or maybe even a house) to rent if we hadn't quickly realized that the buses to and from Kofu stop running at around 7pm and thus I would have no way to get home short of buying a motorized scooter.  We also passed some bright almost florescent greenish yellow rice fields and some spots where they were drying rice.  Very neat!

I expect there may be many more in the future.

The hiking path first took us up the narrow street following the gorge.  It was littered with tacky souvenir shops sellings things that had nothing to do with Shosenkyo, Yamanashi, or even Japan.  The scenery even from the road was gorgeous and the power of the river rushing under the road impressed me as the power of rivers always does.

The path then veered into a narrow paved hiking path that wound its way around the gorge, across a small turquiose bridge and to the coveted waterfall.  We then climbed straight up many wooden steps to another road teeming with souvenir shops.  The souvenirs were no more relevant than at the other shops but at least they were higher quality.  Given that none of them took mastercard.  I did not buy anything, even the postcards I had planned on buying or the small owl purse that I really wanted!

A lot of the stores were selling semi-precious stones.  I'm not sure why.  I guess Yamanashi is famous in Japan for crystal but Ayami and Junko were pretty sure none of the other stones (jade, amethyst, turquoise) were from anywhere near here.  They had some stones that were selling for $40,000 CDN!  With carved crystal buddhas in the hollowed out centres of 3 foot tall chunks of amethyst!  And in one shop the entire back wall was inlaid with slices of different semi-precious walls so that the sun shone through brilliantly!

As we continued up the road and past the art gallery, we came upon a Shinto Shrine and so went up to take a look.  We washed our hands at the fountain with the big gold dippers and headed up the stairs.  Junko bought me a fortune and I found out that I will have to be patient in the coming days as everything I want will only come in time.  The one immediate (and extremely relevant) piece of advise it had for me was that I should move to a new dwelling and sooner was better than later.

We headed to the Art Gallery (which doubles as a bus station) and were harassed by several taxi drivers offering to take us to Kofu Station for the same price as the bus for about 20 minutes, until the bus came.  Ayami made a good point in saying that they were very loud and if we did take the taxi, they would probably not shut up for the whole ride!

The ride back was just as beautiful but I was distracted by trying to spot suitable mountainous accomodation out the window of the bus.  It was only when we once again returned to the ugliness of civilization that we spotted an apartment building or any place that may have been for rent. :(

I tried uploading some pictures to this entry but it is not working on this computer.  Maybe I will try again tomorrow.  Also, I have been spending most of my free time in the last few days reading the English Patient and I think that the writing style maybe influencing my own writing.  Just wait until I get to Ulysses!