Ghibli Hills/Real Life
Ghibli Hills are probably Truth in Television for most of human history until trains became popular. When it's an all-day stagecoach ride from Washington to Baltimore, there's not much point in building commuter suburbs (unless you're wealthy enough to afford to keep a town home and a country manor, spending months at a time in each).
Examples of Ghibli Hills in Real Life include:
Examples in General
- Anywhere that counts as part of the Boreal Forest, especially in Canada. A 10-minute drive out of your local Northern town, and you find yourself literally facing the same countryside that the first settlers had to deal with. Great for hiking and hunting. Feels like The Lost Woods, especially in summertime.
Africa
- Nairobi National Park is just outside Kenya's capital, and as a result the only place you can see entirely wild lions, elephants, rhinos, giraffes, etc with skyscrapers in the background.
Asia
Japan
- The Ghibli version is actually not so unrealistic: 85% of Japan is too steep to be built on or farmed and remains forested. As long as the city you're trying to escape from is not Tokyo, which is located in the middle of one of two plains in the country, you can drive out into the forested hills pretty fast.
- Over the centuries it's been inhabited, the Japanese have cleared and leveled as much as they possibly could and built on every inch they can. Essentially, any place that isn't intensely developed is completely wild.
- Although this is changing as the cities recede from the foothills due to population shrinkage and mass-migration to the largest cities. An estimated 1/4 of houses in the country are abandoned, all in the countryside... still hasn't stopped the logging though.
- Although, the other side of the coin is that since all of the inhabitable land is densely inhabited, it can be jarring to Americans who are used to traveling through wide stretches of extremely sparsely populated land to get between cities.
- Of course, once you leave Tokyo, you know what they have? Three-inch long hornets with venom that can dissolve human flesh, and which it can spray like a cobra! No wonder these people came up with Godzilla!
- Over the centuries it's been inhabited, the Japanese have cleared and leveled as much as they possibly could and built on every inch they can. Essentially, any place that isn't intensely developed is completely wild.
Europe
- Norway. Thank you for your time.
- Sweden qualifies as well.
- Nearly all of Iceland, only without the trees.
- Finland. As a bonus you get the lakes and rivers.
- Ha, Bulgaria's capital, Sofia, is right around Vitosha mountain, which happens to be a natural park too. An hour drive? Sadly yes. Traffic jams.
- Not to mention the natural reserve in the Rila mountain that is one hour away (when you finally leave the city). By the way Rila mountain is the highest mountain in South-Eastern Europe. So yeah...
- The Swiss Alps. Though Alpine scenery has been famously described in positively Mordorian terms:
 |
It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss. |
 |
- Austria's are not much different. Even outside the alpine areas (near the Iron Curtain) you can find fairly Ghibli-esque areas. Just drive a short while and enjoy the scenery.
- A lot of Russia was like this, thanks to Communism deciding that everyone should live in Apartments (better equality and opportunity for spying on each other) making very condensed cities with surrounded by pristine countryside. Less so now.
- Many parts of Tuscany still evoke this, though there are more people and factories dotting the hills these days.
- Many regions in France are a paradise for hikers. Creuse, Ariège, Massif Central and so on. Regarding greenery just outside of the city, Paris has the Sénart, Vincennes and Boulogne forests.
- Many areas in Ireland. Hey, it's called the Emerald Isle for a reason.
- Nearly all the parts of Slovenia that aren't cities/towns/villages. Sometimes during a drive between one village to another, when a road goes through a forest, etc., there can be a feel you are kilometers from civilization. That's also because the forests are original ones, not introduced back by forestation that has even spaces between trees, which makes it look artificial.
- Alpine Austria can of course feel like this, but the most attractive areas (lakes!!!) are often highly populated and f.ex. on the coast of Wörthersee, it's hard to find a semi-wild corner of the beach, there's mostly private villas around (blocking access to the lake!).
- Southern Germany, Alpine and Subalpine regions can feel charming and idyllic, even though they may be populated, or were so in the past (Roman colonies!).
- Poland's very own Gdynia. Aside from being a city built in the 1920s by connecting villages together and building a city center, a good deal of the city area is the Tri-City National Park. The fastest way to get around in Gdynia is to actually go through the woods: this troper used to spend over an hour getting to school for a year before she realized she could cut that time to a little over fifteen minutes by using a simple forest path.
The United Kingdom
- The Home Counties that surround London are steadily becoming more urbanised but still have large areas of countryside. The Surrey hills are particularly nice. London Town itself is surrounded by a government created "Green Belt" area, with development restricted.
- Traveling across the country on a bus, this American trooper was honestly surprised at how much of the UK was still photogenically undeveloped. Or at least hid it well.
- Holyrood Park, being a Royal Park and therefore under the protection of the Crown, is a little bit of Ghibli Hills in the middle of Edinburgh.
- Similarly, Richmond Park is a huge expanse of grassland and woods, to be found in southwest London. It's chiefly known for the hundreds of deer which roam there.
- That bleak, wild forest clearing in the opening battle scene of Gladiator? Bourne Woods, Surrey.
- "Cleckhuddersfax" in Yorkshire has nice, relatively undisturbed woodland a ten minute walk from civilisation, in what is probably the most densely populated area of the UK outside of a major city.
North America
Canada
- Ottawa's "Green Belt".
- Much of Canada, for that matter. Winnipeg in particular, despite its large footprint and significant number of sleeper communities, just sort of springs up from out of nowhere, especially as you approach from the south. Many logging communities are built in the woods, and five minutes out of town is also five minutes into the forest. Cities in the arctic regions are devoid of the farmland or orchards surrounding more southern destinations. The second-largest country in the world by land mass has an abysmally low population (about 34 million, as of January 2011) and the resulting small population density is emphasized by the massive distances between major centers. To give you an idea: St. John's, Newfoundland, is closer to London - across the freakin' Atlantic Ocean - than it is to Victoria, BC.
- Calgary, Alberta is around an hour's drive from the Rocky Mountains, so this fits the description above perfectly. Those who find Banff National Park to be a bit crowded will find solitude in the Kananaskis Park.
- An example closer to home is Nose Hill, which has become an oasis of nature surrounded completely by subdivisions. Zoning laws prohibit development on Nose Hill to preserve the prairie wildlife, and today, it is a popular park for hikers and cyclists. A conservation-development program is under way, aiming to pave existing gravel trails and replanting where cyclists have previously torn up the vegetation. Native trees are also being planted on the slopes of the park.
- The Oak Ridges Moraine outside of Toronto.
The USA
- Gas Works Park in Seattle, and....the rest of Washington, really.
- Except for the ruins of the Gas Works itself.
- Real Life Example: Boston's "Emerald Necklace".
- Another Real Life example: Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, which also really * is* a national park.
- Cleveland's Metroparks, which also go by the nickname "Emerald Necklace".
- Large parts of the world have been like this throughout history, except our ancestors for very good reasons usually thought more in terms of lawless than pristine.
- It would seem parts of Central Park in NYC would invert this.
- Yellowstone National Park.
- Glacier National Park.
- Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Especially Fern Canyon, which was a filming location for the Jurassic Park sequel.
- Appalachia, specifically in the mountainous regions of North Carolina, USA. Take a compass and some survival gear, because if you park your car and walk for fifteen-twenty minutes, you will be so far from civilization that you can't hear it anymore.
- Oregon. The government just signed in 200,000 more acres of protected forest. Soon, there'll be Portland, Salem, and Eugene, and that's it.
- That assumes the cities are the only bastions of civilization. There are plenty of developed areas outside the I-5 corridor, we just put a minimum of 10–20 miles of wilderness between them. Essentially, just about every community in the Pacific Northwest is surrounded by Ghibli Hills/Forest/Mountains.
- Oregonian woods are often more gardens then wilderness with convenient lodging and rest stops close by and well marked trails. Eastern Oregon which is semi desert is more wild.
- Tacoma and Olympia are like this. Many wild parks. In Tacoma particularly you can be amid dense trees a half hour from downtown if you check Google Maps first.
- That assumes the cities are the only bastions of civilization. There are plenty of developed areas outside the I-5 corridor, we just put a minimum of 10–20 miles of wilderness between them. Essentially, just about every community in the Pacific Northwest is surrounded by Ghibli Hills/Forest/Mountains.
- Upstate or the Northernmost part of California.
- Vermont, it's not called the Green Mountain State for nothing, but that might be because there was very little urbanization to begin with...
- The Wasatch Front (the western slopes of the Wasatch Mountains) in Utah is home to two million people strung out along a 120-mile long north-south axis. It's an average of 5 miles wide and never more reaches a width of more than 18 miles. Ten minutes to the east and you're in deep forest and/or open grassy plateaus. Thirty minutes to the west and you're in barren salt flats and deserts. Two hours to the south, you're in arid redrock country. One hour to the north, vibrant farmland. The next major urban area is 300+ miles in any direction. Even in the Wasatch Front, if there are enough rain clouds (which isn't horribly often though), the Wasatch Mountains look like the Misty Mountains.
- Juneau, Alaska. Even the cheapest apartments have stellar views of unspoiled pine forests, and the university overlooks a giant glacier. Getting to an area of virgin woodland is a matter of about a five minute walk in any direction.
- This is particularly amazing to a Troper from the California desert. So much green EVERYWHERE. All of it damp and soft and fertile.
- A lot of New England. Even along the highways, there's beautiful forest all around.
- East of San Francisco, California across the bay and on the other side of Oakland Hills is this incarnate,and truthfully just about all of California that isn't in the Central Valley or the Mojave Desert or in one of the Urban Areas is this what with the vast amount of Redwoods.
- Arkansas is not called "The Natural State" for no reason.
- Driving along the West Virginia Turnpike has this in spades. Once you're past the suburban sprawl of Charleston, WV, the unspoiled mountain wilderness that surrounds the road is almost surreal. One particularly beautiful moment comes anytime after a rainstorm - a small creek that flows along the road for about a mile is suddenly swollen and gushing with intensity. Most of Appalachia in general has this.
Oceania
- Most of New Zealand, except possibly Auckland.
- Sydney is particularly Egregious with this. Unless (or in some cases even if) you're on the major transport corridors, you're likely to be in the wilderness, often officially. This is entirely justified however, mainly due to the very rough terrain surrounding the Sydney Basin, which is full of canyons, steep valleys and thick vegetation.
- Go to a map. Look for Australia. Look for New South Wales, and go to its most North-Eastern point. That region is called "The Northern Rivers". Here one will find The Caldera, so named for the fact that the entire region was once a large shield volcano that went extinct. All the mountains there are the result of erosion, leading to rounded yet striking mountains. In the centre you will find Mt. Warning (Wollumbin), the first point each morning in all of Australia to be struck by the light of dawn. Much of the "pristine-ness" of the region is simply due to both the enormous amount of crownland (land that cannot be settled due to steepness or inaccessibility, or even logged practically) and the fact that most of population there lives in either villages of varying size or in Murwillumbah, the largest town in the Caldera, with a population of less than 8,000. Despite the number of farms (the region might better fit in 'Arcadia' for this reason) they are usually small and hardly damage the land (leave a farm for a few dozen years and it looks like old-growth). Examples on the other wiki here and here on the Other Wiki. There is a reason the area is filled with hippies, ex-hippies and general environmentalists.
South America
- Two words. Costa Rica. More Scenery Porn that you can possibly imagine while cruising it leisurely in 24 hours or less. Nuff said.