Wandering Through Japan - Gotenyama

If you are anything like me, then at some point in your life you have likely been sitting in a train or driving along when in the distance you see something that catches your eye. You then tell yourself that one day you will travel off the beaten path and go to that place. Today was one of those rare moments when I actually went to such a place, though I hope to have such moments more frequently with my new travel plans in place!

For nearly two years I watched it pass by as I took a train to work on the Tokaido line, wondering what was at the top of the mountain that stood tantalisingly close to Shinkanbara station. A word of advice, should you ever visit these small towns in Japan - trust the local maps and your own eyes more than Google maps or similar application. You can often find a map detailing local sites of note near the train station. Failing that you should find some signposting along the road, unless the site has fallen out of favour with the locals and now sits hidden away behind meters of foliage.

Fortunately, Gotenyama is reasonably well signposted and is a part of the Kanbara trail, meaning there are a number of paths that all take you to its peak, and beyond if you are in the mood for some hiking. We took the quickest path to the foot of the mountain, leaving the train station behind us and heading north(ish). Had we trusted in Google, what was actually a ten minute walk would have been magically transformed into an hour and a half trek as it tried to walk us around the entire foot of the mountain and up an entirely different road.

The picture above is the start of the mountain path we took today, first leading us to a small Shinto shrine before taking a sharp turn to the right where it began to properly wind its way up the mountain. It was a beautiful, though surprisingly hot, autumn day; a typhoon having just passed by in the south and taking the cold front with it. We took the walk slowly, partly because of the heat and incline, but also because we had to make a number of stops to tactfully rearrange the spider webs crossing over the path. Apparently we were the first people to walk this way in quite some time, and the spiders were not the only sign of this. Much of the wooden railing had seen better days, with a couple of sections missing entirely where it had rotted and snapped. Other places were entirely overgrown with vines and foliage; the cancellation of most hanami picnics (cherry blossom viewing picnics) in the spring clearly giving the opportunistic plants their moment to strike!

Despite these obstructions, the path was still delightfully lined with opportunities to look out over Shin Kanbara and the Pacific ocean, the pictures of which you will be able to find in my photo gallery on facebook. After about twenty minutes of walking, more than twice the suggested time, we found ourselves at the first of our destinations - the Sakura (cherry blossom) bridge. This part was a little disappointing and a hint unnerving as the suspension bridge creaked a little too much for my tastes as we crossed it. In theory, from this bridge you are rewarded with a spectacular panoramic view of the ocean. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned growth spurts this has, for now at least, been replaced with a lot of trees.

Luckily this was not all we had come to see, and we quickly continued our ascent. By this point the trail had become hidden among the trees, giving a real sense of adventure to our journey as though we were the first to come here in a decade or more as we left all sights and sounds of civilisation behind. This sense of discovering a lost world was enhanced when we stumbled out into a clearing, which was optimistically labelled as a park. Don't get me wrong, it had a serene beauty to it found only in places entirely without other people in it, but the days of children playing here seemed far behind it. The only thing that really allowed it to hold on to such a label at all was the concrete and metal abomination that I can only call 'the murder slide'. Any child brave enough to attempt this hazard / entertainment feature would surely have been launched off the side of the mountain, unless they had a gang of friends to act as some sort of human barrier to slow their momentum.

This left us near the peak, and we once more moved slowly up, though this time opting for what had once been a road, judging by the greenish tarmac hiding under more vines. After a further five minutes of walking we found ourselves at another park, though this one appeared to be generally more maintained. Here we found an observation point, which, unlike the bridge before, did indeed allow us to see clearly out to sea. On a fine day like this we could see far and wide; from the river Fuji all the way over to the city of Numazu on the other side of Suruga bay.

Since we are still sadly unable to fly, we could go up no further and turned back to make the decent. We decided to take a different path down, which eventually took us to another small shrine. This one, Shohachiman looked a lot more typical of Japanese shrines and included a pair of shrine guardians just in front of the hall, though lacked the colour and brightness of the first, which I while I believe it is called Aimori Inari, the kanji could be read in a few different ways and, like many place names in Japan, could have an entirely different local reading. From here it was a short walk back to the station, and eventually we made it safely home.

If you would like to see more of my travels through Japan please do check out my website Wandering Through Japan