I don't know where the rumor came from, but we heard a rumor that there is a tradition in Japan to hike up a mountain on New Years Day so that you can see the sun rise. It sounds like a thing that you would tell foreigners to troll them, but even if that's the case, we went and did it.
We took a bus to Kintaikyo Bridge, at the base of the mountain. I call it a mountain because everyone calls it a mountain, but really it's just a big, steep hill. At the base of the mountain, there is one terminal of the ropeway. I would call it a gondola, or tram, or something else, but it's a car that is pulled by a cable up the mountain. Coming from San Francisco, I would not call that a Cable Car, but I can understand why someone would. Here, it's called the ropeway. There are two cars, one going up, and one going down, and they switch every fifteen to thirty minutes.
By the time we reached the top, the sun had already risen, but it was still a nice trip. It snowed here in the winter, so there were patches of snow on the ground, something I have not seen in a while. There were a bunch of people up there, spread across a variety of ages. There were families with kids, elderly couples, young couples, and groups of friends. If this really is something that they tell foreigners to trick them, they are working really hard to get them to believe it.
At the top of the mountain, there is a castle. I still haven't been inside, but I really should look around at some point. I've probably mentioned this before, but this castle is a replica of the one that stood on top of the mountain before. Even the foundation is a reproduction; the original foundation still stands nearby. I don't know why they moved it, but the new location can be seen from the town, so maybe that's why.
From the top of the mountain, the five arches of Kintaikyo bridge are visible altogether. The camera that I have just pixelates the images when it zooms, so it's not a great quality photo, but it's a good vantage point.
Here is another picture of it from the ground. It's harder to get all five spans in one shot from close by. There is a fee to cross the bridge, so when you want to get across the river, you have to take another bridge a little ways up river from Kintaikyo bridge. This is a little more of a walk from the bus station, but it's not that bad. This picture was taken from that bridge.
That's all I got about New Years Day. It's been a pretty good year. I've been doing more stuff than I've been able to post about, so that seems like a good balance of busy and free time. If I had more free time and not enough stuff to post, that would probably mean that I should go out and do more stuff. As it is, getting more stuff to post than I can post seems like a good thing. I still have 7 folders of Tokyo trip pictures to post, and I haven't uploaded or sorted the Kyoto pictures yet, so there is much to do.
At the time of this post, SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He's sick, because somehow after 2 years of CoViD, some people didn't learn the lessons about how to prevent the spread of airborne diseases.