Japanaventures 9: Day 6 - Matsuyama Castle

We had some time to kill the afternoon of the day of the wedding, so we decided to venture forth into the oppressive heat and go up to Matsuyama Castle. It sits up on top of a large hill that overlooks the city. If you're in to heat stroke, you can walk up to the top, or if you don't like sweating through every layer of your clothing, you can either ride up in cable car or on the chair lift.

We bought a round trip ticket that covered both the gondola and the chair lift and on the escalators up to the loading zone we decided to take the chair lift for no real reason other than I wanted to ride the chair lift.

Now, I don't know what I was expecting the chair lift to be, but it certainly was not what I saw. It was a plastic chair, much like an old school chair, attached to a pole suspended from a cable. That's it. Oh, and there was a little sun shade at the top.



Fortunately your not that far above the tree tops during the ride, lending the illusion that you're not really as far off the ground as you actually are. It's best not to think about how easy it would be to slip off the chair and plummet to your death, and just sit quietly facing forwards.



Or twist around in your seat so you can take a picture of your girlfriend on the chair behind you.



Somehow we survived the trip to the top, where the man greeting us cheerfully asked if we wanted our picture taken, presumable to celebrate that we were still alive.



Then we hiked up to the main courtyard of the castle and enjoyed some of the views, but mostly we went straight to the ice cream stand to cool down. Not only was the ice cream great, but they had huge blocks of ice sitting around to help people cool off.



We took the gondola down.