Nanatsu Mori

The symbol of Taiwa is a set of seven small mountains that can be seen in the distance. These are known as nana-tsu mori or seven forests. A while ago, at my official town welcome party I heard an interesting legend about nana-tsu mori. According to legend, each mountain has a god. And if you climb all seven mountains and pray to all seven gods, you get good luck for life or eternal happiness or something. So this became my new goal.

I had the day off so I took my new car to nana-tsu mori. I drove around for a while (only accidentally turning on my windshield wipers twice) trying to get to the mountains and to a spot where I could park and walk around. Eventually I found a place to park my car and started walking. I had trouble finding any usable trails though. Sometimes I found some trail markers, but hiking is clearly not all that popular around here because the trails were overgrown to the point where I wouldn't exactly call them trails anymore--in other words, they were impassable. At some point I did make it up to a high point of sorts. I'm pretty sure it wasn't an actual peak, but I clapped my hands together 3 times just in case there was a god living there. I also found a nice creek. So although I didn't do too much actual hiking, I had a nice time.