Deutsche Version folgt bald...

As winter is the oyster (Kaki in Japanese) season and Hiroshima prefecture is very famous for oysters the Gansu group chose an opportunity to attend an oyster festival in combination with a hiking event. Therefore we met in the small town of Kuba, which is located in the western part of the prefecture and of course near the sea.

First we approached the site of the festival to learn that there are free oysters available if one is very very patient and queues up in a long line. As we had a tough schedul, at least we wanted to climb Mount Gyoja as well, we resigned to get free oysters and some of us helped ourselves with Kaki-Udon, a japanese Noudle soup with oyster(s). After a delicious meal we started to hike, although the weather conditions were not exactly what we wanted. At least there was lots of sunshine, but some rainshowers in between made us a little cooling down from time to time.

Nevertheless we climbed up the mountain, it was a not so easy task. The mountain is only 319 meters high, but the way up was vers steep and narrow, so we had to take care to set our steps on the right place. Finally we reached the peak and could enjoy a marvellous view from the West, where we saw Ohtake City, via South with the Seto Inland sea (Seto Naikai) to the East with Miyjima Island and Hiroshima City in the background. Thanks to the few rainshowers the air was very clear and the visibility was incredibly good. But the day was not over yet.

As a part of the group already started to go down somebody spotted a beautiful perfect rainbow on the sky in the North-East and so some of us took a little time there to take pictures and to enjoy this marvellous effect of natural laws. After this beautiful nature event we finally started to descend the mountain. On the way down some of us were invited by Kaminaka sensei to try rock climbing. So we went down a huge rock with help of a rope. It was a little scary but nevertheless I was glad that I made this experience on such a beautiful hiking day!

Movies:
As I made a movie of the hike I invite you to see them. To see the movies you need to install Windows Media Player which can be downloaded from the Microsoft homepage on your computer. As well you can download the movies by pressing the right mouse button and choosing save target as.

Part One (3.4 MB), Part Two (4 MB), Part Three (2.8 MB)

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