Mt. Haguro and temple nearby

We took a tour from YH to Mt. Haguro and on a way we stopped by a temple, Gyokusenji. The temple had a nice Japanese garden and we could enjoy several kinds of cherry blossoms. In Tokyo cherry blossoms were finished some weeks ago, but there were some kinds still blooming since spring comes later there. It was my first time to see moutain cherry blossoms. They are so pretty, white, pink and dark pink colours. I also enjoyed Yaezakura which I could see in Tokyo. Yaezakura is a dark pink cherry blossoms whose petal is bigger than regular ones. It blooms at the last of the season so we can enjoy them when other kinds are finished. At the temple I was lucky to see a white frog. It is a frog which changes clours according to where it stands on.

I enjoyed the Japaneses garden with maccha(deep green tea) and wagashi(a Japanese sweet).

Then we rode by the foot of Mt. Haguro and started to walk up to the top where is a shrine. Haguro-san(san means mountain in Japanese) is my favorite place for relaxing. I like the established pathway to cherish greens of Sugi. Sugi is a kind of trees which grow straight up to the sky. I only hiked in August, middle of summer before and I did not expect to see that kind of deep green clours this time(and it was right). But for my first time I enjoyed young green clours. I did not know leaf clour changes into various kind of greens as it gets older. As I went higher, I could see more bright yellow green colours, which were prettty.

Well, a bad point was that I could not relax so much due to many people since it was during a golden week(the longest national holiday in Japan). Also, it was pity that the temple was covered somewhat since its roof was renovated(this temple is famous for its roof)!  

We took a bus back to a station from the top and took a highway bus to Sendai station. I wish we had time to walk around the little city nearby the mountain, Tsuruoka city, such as seeing an interesting church inside of which there is tatami(Japanese style straw mat) and black St. Maria statue(maybe I wrote a blog about it before). Instead we enjoyed a big grocery store at a big mall(both of us live in Tokyo where it is difficult to do a decent grocery shopping). We were surprised at how developed Sendai station is. It could be much more city than several stations in Tokyo. We met a guy from Sendai at Mt. Haguro and asked him what is for sightseeing there but heard nothing really, so we just streight to buy a ticket and got on a slow local train to a little town in Fukushima-ken.