Just wanted to share a small piece of discovery... when you are climbing up to a typical mountain-top shrine, there are chances that you will recall the number of steps you climbed better than the height in feet or meters. I discovered that if the stairs were comfortably placed so that it did not call for a great EFFORT to climb, they were probably about 9 inches tall! So you can just take the total number of steps you climbed and deduct 25% of that number... voila, you have the height in feet. Divide this by 3.33 and you get the height in meters!

One word of caution: be sure there were no places where you had no steps.. it topples your calculation!!

Why am I talking about climbing?   We'll come to it soon.