TENGU December Regular Tour

Hello! Everyone, I’m Nancy. On our regular tour of this month, I was with Ryo who is one of the experienced guides of our club, and our guest was a guy from Italy. He studies insects at Tokyo Metropolitan University.

Autumn leaves in Mt. Takao were at the end of their peak but the air was so clear that we could enjoy beautiful scenery everywhere.

Our guest is a specialist of cave spiders (Have you heard of that spiders? It’s the first time for me), and he said that he was interested in Japanese culture and history, so we recommended him to walk on the trail No 1 with a Buddhist temple.

Scenery from Kompiradai was so wonderful, being able to look over to far Shinjuku, Tokyo Skytree and so on. In addition to that, what a view of Mt. Fuji from the top! The beauty of a snow-white mountain in a blue sky was breathtaking. Everybody there was wowed by that.

After lunch we walked down on the trail No.4 and the trail Biwataki. It was a rough rocky course but the guest was a really good walker and so was Ryo, I had to walk harder to catch up with them.

On the way of Biwataki, there are two small shrines in the stone caves called Iwayadaishi.  As a cave spiders’ researcher, he would never missed caves. Naturally, he said us “Can I see them?” Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any spiders, so we took him to 599 Museum at the end of the tour. There are no spiders but are beautiful Takao’s plants, animals and insects displayed in crystal glass. He looked at them one by one closely.

I hoped he found it interesting and would come back sometime in a warmer season. Spiders will be more active around that time.



 (Nancy)