Comment by tlear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlear | Hacker News Reader

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I live in Japan as well.

Hiking.. have you actually hiked anywhere in else in the world? Most places you can fill a garbage bag in an hour just walking on a trail. Took my climbing friends from Canada on a long Hike in Kita Alps, they brought a garbage bag as they always do to gather other peoples trash. We managed to find 2 empty water bottles in 3 days having covered close to 50km. See the campsites near huts after people leave in the morning they are EMPTY.

Try camping at a car camp sites.. now compare that to the clusterfuck of drunks, blaring music, trash, puke piss, shit that you get in NA. Went to Ishikawa for a week this summer camped by the sea, huge camp site tons of people actually very nice. Same thing in US? God fucking help you. This is why they actually don’t have assigned lots for tents, in Canada people would get killed every long weekend if anyone was dumb to try that(car camping)

Of course there is garbage in cities in some places but compared to vast majority of the world it is clean. They actually clean public toilets.. it is a miracle.

Where do you camp otherwise where you are seeing all this trash? Even in developed sites I don’t think I’ve ever seen what you are describing here. Definitely nothing even remotely like that once you get a little further from the trail.

There are a couple of places where people have left shotgun shells that I can think of around some of the 4 wheeling areas around Phoenix, but it’s nowhere near any sort of hiking trail.

Bugger me for living in a country with no mountains at all.

Japan's Alps really are quite something. Leaving the area cleaner than you found it is taken quite seriously by Japanese hikers.

I've hiked in the Southern Alps, including up Kitadake, Japan's second highest mountain, during my stay there as a graduate student. The occasional views you get of Mount Fuji standing far out in the plains are breathtaking! I joined a hiking group at the university I was staying at, which proofed a rewarding way to get to know Japan's hiking culture.

To be fair though, as soon as you leave the family-friendly day-trip hiking trails leading from the valleys to mountain hotels/restaurants well below the treeline in Europe's Alps behind and get to the trails that require at least a minimal amount of preparation and gear the story is much the same. People clean up after themselves, and pick the incidental wrapper or bottle lost by others along the way. People who hike up a mountain are on the whole a lot more respectful of nature and personal responsibility.

Just want to say I’ve hiked significantly across the UK and there is extremely little litter

Agreed. There's very little litter in the UK countryside because (generalising) the people who litter don't go there and the people who do are included to pick it up.

British towns and cities aren't great, embarrassingly bad compared to the Japanese cities I've been to.

I spent a weekend in Lisbon recently and was fairly shocked at how bad the litter / rubbish was. The worst I've seen in Europe. Warm climate made it smelly too.

San Francisco Bay Area hiking areas seem really clean to me.

The camp sites I've visited in the area seem reasonably clean, too.

Trails in Finland are spotless. But I guess that's cos there's just not many people to begin with.

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