... to climb Fuji twice is foolish, or so they say anyway.
And having climbed it - we can honestly say that we totally agree!
What a feeling though.
Just to get there was a mission and a half. We got some special nature reserve ticket things that allowed us unlimited travel within the area and it was just as well as we had to take busses and trains, cable-cars and ropeways all over the place - but it was worth it.
This photo was taken once we got to Kawaguchiko - from where one can start the walk. We however, got a taxi to the 5th station which is where everyone starts walking from.
To give some of you an idea of how high it is - 5th station is at the height of the top of Table Mountain - abou 1000m. And that's +/- a quarter of the way up. We can't explain how high it was and photos don't really capture the height either - but take it from me - it's f£$*ing high!We started walking at about 10pm and when we started passing snow, it was a pretty clear indicator that we were getting higher. Fuji has snow on it all year round, but is only climbable for about 2 months because the snow is too hectic otherwise. This was one of the reasons Cath and I wanted to travel at this time.
It was pretty tough going once we'd been walking for a few hours. Cath seemed fine but I struggled for breath. We were just wearing our trainers so we'd take two steps up and slide back one on the loose stones and gravel-type surface.Needless to say, I needed a rest or two. Oh, it was so cold I had to put my spare top over my head to ward off the polar wind and the icy rain. I wisely decided to leave my beanie at the guest house and at the time, I couldn't find my gloves so for the six hours up and five hours down my teeth were making chattering noises.
I won't put up too many photies cos our Japan trip was two weeks long and we took about 2000 photos, but we can't go on without showing you what the sunrise looked like from the top. The reason you climb overnight is so that you can witness this - and there were about 20-30 of us up there - from all sorts of countries, but mostly Japs.
This was about the moment when the sun finally burst through and the photo below, with us cowering like little girls, was soon after. Note: the things peaking through the clouds in the photo to the right are MOUNTAINS! That's how high we were - we were looking down on mountain peaks!
I tried to set up the tripod to take photos but my hands were so cold, that touching the metal wasn't really helping. I had serious concerns about frostbite!
And what summit would be complete without a
photo with the flag at the top. Sigh, the wind whipping in at our faces, sleet hitting us in the eyes - the memories, the fun! This is at the Torii gate at the top, we wanted to take a photo looking down into the crater but I was too worried that I'd either be blown into the hole (which was about the size of a small suburb) or that the hail would break the camera.
Last but not least, once we were down we took this photo of the volcano. It isn't great - the weather was still a bit dodgy but just for an idea of what it looks like...
We actually stayed in Tokyo for a night before we headed to the Fuji-Hakone National park - but this was the first epic thing we did so we made it part 1.
For those interested, our buddy Madz also climbed Fuji and had a slightly different experience of it all. While we had relatively few people on the mountain by comparison, Madz had hordes of them - and she took some cool photies. Have a look at her blog at:
http://madeleine-in-japan.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
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