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Hike report by Nicolas
The night hike is over and both cars came back safely to Tsukuba.
The start of the hike was unusually late (for the club standard): 9pm and... nobody came to 7/11 as almost everybody went directly to El Torito (and EVERYBODY was almost on time at El Torito!).
During our dinner Tadashi joined us and later Jirka and Vitalik also came (but just to say "bye" before leaving Japan).
Around 23:30 we left El Torito. We were 8 hikers (Will, Jan, James, Saswattee, Ginny, Tadashi, Sveta and Nicolas) and 2 cars. After a stop at a convenience store, we drove to the end of the hike where we left a car at 1:00am. At 1:30 we started hiking from Atago Jinja in Iwama.
Weather was fine and we could see many stars in the sky(*) and the lights of the kanto plain through the trees.
(*) Someone claims that he even saw an octuple (8) star, but I believe that the Tequila added a few stars to the count.
At around 3:00am we were in advance on the schedules and we made a long eating break (can we call that a lunch break at 3:00am?).
Then the path became a bit slipery and some of us were slowed down. At 5:00am we realized that we were a bit behind the schedules and those who could hurried to the summit of Wagakuni-san, but they reached it too late for the sunrise at 5:30. We enjoyed the view from the summit anyway and after a long breakfast/supper break we left these beautiful views around 6:30am to go back in the valley. Tadashi and Nicolas went first to go get the cars. The last hikers reached Fukuhara station around 8:45 and we left around 9:00 am. At 10:00am we were all back in Tsukuba tired but happy after that unusual hiking experience.