E phatlaladitšwe: 08.06.2023
On the north side of Sado, near the Ryotsu Port, there are some slightly larger mountains and a few beautiful hiking trails. On one of the mountains, there is a mountain station with a cafe, a small souvenir shop, and a campsite. Today, we meet Ike-San again to clean a pond on the mountain with iron. Just like last time, we open the hand warmers and pour the contents, which contain citric acid and water, into a bottle. We have lunch at the mountain station and then we start our hike up the mountain. As we go higher, the plants grow wider instead of taller. The bamboo forms a carpet that looks almost like a meadow, and even the cedars, which usually grow straight upward, are flat and branching here. It takes about half an hour to reach the summit, but since it's all uphill, it's really exhausting. Unfortunately, it's very cloudy on this day, and instead of the beautiful view of the valley, all we see is a white wall. But it's still about the same distance to the pond, which is next to an emergency hut. This time, luckily, we go downhill partially. When we arrive, we pour the brown soup into the pond again. From the emergency hut, we can even briefly look down into the valley before a wall of clouds obstructs our view again. The return trip turns out to be even more exhausting because the path back to the summit is steeper than the one we took on the way there. Additionally, the ground is very wet, and in some places, the gravel path is very loose, causing us to constantly slip. Nevertheless, we all manage to make it back to the car in one piece, and on the way back, we stop at a souvenir shop in Ryotsu. There, my avocado gets a new friend, a small, chubby Toki, who now sits next to her on the shelf in our room.