Mt. Kobo

It was one of my last hikes with Scarlett before she was leaving Japan. I decided to go for Mt. Kobo in Hadano to catch the last sights of cherry blossoms before all the petals fall off. Scarlett was late for a bit but it all turned out pretty well for us. On the way to the trailhead, we were walking along the river and suddenly Scarlett seemed to recognize one of her old friends from before. We slowly approached and it seems like it really was her acquaintance with her own group of friends. As they caught up with each other, I slowly got to meet the guys behind them. Teep from Thailand with his girlfriend, Chinatsu. Dev and his wife Dolly, both from India and the one with Scarlett was Umi, also from Thailand. They were a really nice bunch and I got along with them straight away.

At the start of the hike, I started to talk to Chinatsu and then to Umi. It was a pretty serendipitous occasion as Scarlett was a long time hiking buddy of mine and with her leaving, I was quite sad but I guess the universe always does its thing and I ended up making five new friends as a replacement. The hike was really easy, with not much inclines and a smooth one all the way until we reached the first summit of Mt. Asama. There was an observatory to get better views of the surroundings and plenty of people taking picnics below the sakura. We proceeded further up along the mountain to the summit of Mt. Kobo where we had a picnic.

The last bit was another easy way down towards Tsurumaki Onsen, where we said goodbye to Scarlett as she had to go back to Tokyo while I wanted to get to know these new people a bit more so we all headed to a nearby onsen which was unfortunately full to the brim. Giving up, we went back to Tokyo and had dinner in Shinjuku's Tim Ho Wan. I got to talk about Hinduism with Dev and Dolly. We touched on the Gita and Dev's line really struck a chord with me, "There are no shortcuts in life," it's something that really reinforced a lot of the things I was planning on doing moving forward. The dinner was absolutely fabulous and I went to the sento near my place to catch up on the missed onsen opportunity.Read more