Forest escape

Now the rains have lifted, we open the curtains each morning to deep blue skies and the incessant metallic shrilling of cicadas. By eleven you could fry an egg on the balcony, and to open the front door in the afternoon is to step into the hot blast from a sauna. Most days the boys and I stay inside until early evening, but with the windows shut tight to keep the air conditioning in we all find ourselves getting a little frayed by the end of the day. So on Wednesday I drove them up to Mino Park, in the hills that bound Osaka to the north, for some forest therapy.

Mino is the closest summer getaway to Osaka, and one of the nicest for a day trip. A path winds up through deep woods along a swift-flowing river, with deep pools teeming with stippled brown fish, past an insect museum and onward to a high waterfall. Getting the boys out of the car and started up the path was hard - the first few hundred meters were punctuated by continual complaints that they were tired, their thermoses were too heavy, their fishing nets were too hard to carry, the monkeys who live in the forest were sure to attack us - but once we were a little way into the woods, their negativity fell away and the peace of the river carried us laughing and playing up the hill.


First stop was the insect museum. Though the boys enjoyed the tanks of beetles and scary-looking centipedes, their real aim was to get to the butterfly house, where hundreds of butterflies fly freely and the boys tried again and again to lift them gently up from flowers onto their outstretched fingers.














Then we trekked on up the hill to the waterfall. On the way up we'd passed a monkey, sitting high on a rock wall overlooking the path. The forest monkeys can sometimes be quite aggressive in trying to steal food, but if you're not openly holding something edible they generally leave people alone. This one followed us up the path a little way, before it decided that we weren't all that interesting and settled down at a corner to wait for the next group to come along.



After the steep walk, we ate lunch sitting in the cool spray from the waterfall before deciding we deserved ices. The shop where we bought Dan's chocolate icecream and Kei's strawberry kakigori (ice shavings topped with syrup) had something I've never seen before: a mineral-water foot spa below one of the tables, where you could sip your drink while cooling off your feet from the mountain climb. We ate our ices outside for fear of spilling, and then spent a happy ten minutes splashing our feet in the cool spring water.






























By the time the boys had played for an hour in the river, made friends with a half-Japanese, half-Russian boy they met there, and run with him all the way down the path to the bottom of the mountain again, they were both exhausted and deeply content. This is what summer holidays are meant to be like; the perfect antidote to the confinement of the city.