2013-11-24 Louis, Papa et Maman à 高尾山

Family walk up to Takao-san, the most crowded hill of Japan, if not the world.

The weather was great, the timing ideal for autumn leaves so we set for a stroll to Takao-san (or should I say a "crowd bath"). The line for the cable car was about 2 hours both to go up or down, the line for the women's bathroom exceeded 30 minutes on the lower places and the density of people on the trail was above 1 person / m2 and possibly up to ten times that (my own estimate hehe).

We took trail 1 to go up (kind of the highway, paved all the way) and trail 3 to go down up to the top of the cable car (a nicer trail with much less traffic but a lot of stairs on the top part)

We saw funny things: girls with full hiking equipment including mountaineering boots, just to walk on a paved trail wide enough for cars to pass. I had less gears the day before for a winter hike where there was a good deal of snow and some ice. We also saw people wearing gaiters, obviously they bought the crap from the store and probably will never understand that gaiters are only useful for walking on deep snow...
We could hear groups of unhealthy people complaining about the sheer slopes (barely 15 degrees), other groups of people rejoicing over the sight of the city from the observation spots, after 1 hour without seeing much of civilization they must have felt reassured.

Most surprisingly we managed to find a nice spot where I could flip my tripod and take a few shots with red-colored trees in the background, the whole thing without being annoyed by any tourist.

Think of Takao-san as a mountain and you'll be disappointed, think of it as more colorful Shinjuku and you'll enjoy it better.