I have way too many ridiculous stories to tell than I have time to type so I`ll stick with a recap of last nights adventure.
April 7 Sandan Kyo
My feet are pissed and ready to go home to my bicycle. We hiked 10 miles and camped out in the middle of a gorge last night. The 2 hour bus ride out to the trail was pure bliss- like driving through the narrow curvy St.Thomas roads but in a bus! We got dropped off practically at the trailhead in the middle of nowhere at dusk with little food, no tent or tarp, just our sleeping bags and a snake bite kit. We stopped in the only restaurant looking place there, which was an experence it in itself. The man spoke only Japanese and we had no idea what to order. I kept trying to read out of the book that I was vegetarian, he didn`t seem to understand but continued to talk to us in Japanese the entire time we were in there. We ended up with a bowl of udon with lots of different shades and textures of green(both vegetarian and delicious). He talked to us in Japanese, we nodded a lot, tried to guess to each other what he could possibly be talking about. At the end of our meal Kate felt it necessary to tell him Nihongo wa dekimasen (we don`t speak japanese) as if it wasn`t obvious at that point. I couldn`t stop laughing and kate almost had an asthma attack so we got the hell out of there to start the hike. 
The hike was gorgeous- walking on cliffs beside crystal clear water, waterfalls, swinging bridges. I was hoping to see monkeys but instead we got a snake coming at us across the trail with its mouth wide open. We had no option but to sleep in a grassy clearing in our sleeping bags so we read up on how to use the snake bite kit and practiced a bit before bed. It rained a little and became freezing cold so we ended up sleeping on some benches under an overhang. We woke up at dawn this morning, finished the hike and missed the bus by 15 minutes. We sat outside in the freezing cold for 3 hours for another bus but we made it back!
Tomorrow we go to Shikoku to work on an orange farm for 3 days....
:Other exciting events:
-hiking around Nara (a day trip from Osaka) through orange and persimmon farms, and best of all kumquats!!! Other highlights of the hike included strolling through a moated village, eating sommen noodles at a temple that were handmade and dried there, and my favorite part- a burial mound which appeared as a beautiful forested hill surrounded by a moat! Gorgeous!
-sleeping in a capsule hotel
-mastering non-western toilets (yes, a hole in the ground)
-an incident involving a musical toilet with a bidet that resulted in me getting soaked.
-a woman rushing out of her apartment to give us 2 umbrellas while it was raining in Tokyo
-Osaka`s crazy nightlife with mobs of people wandering the streets, stores lit with fluorescent lights, Japanese girls dressed up as dolls trying to lure people into their stores and restaurants.
-wandering into one of the malls to find it filled with zakka, Japanese contemporary craft. Beautiful linens and cottons, kitchen items, and wood furniture.
April 7, 2010
April 7, 2010
