The Fuji Climb...

Well, it turns out that I have actually managed to get a second entry out of this blog - which is actually quite an achievement!
Anyway, this weekend climbed Mt Fuji, which was pretty crazy and a hell of a lot more tiring and strenous than I was expecting. Climbing for over six hours is tiring enough, but it was the crowds that really made it an endurance test. We set of from the fifth station - Kawaguchiko in Yamanashi prefecture at around 6pm in the evening. We carried on climbing until about ten that same evening, by which time were at the eighth station, and feeling extremely confident that we would make it to the top by sunset. This was not to be the case. By the time we were off again just before 2am (having slept in one of the mountain cabins) we realised that everyone else on the mountain had exactly the same idea. The sheer volume of people was so overwhelming I wouldn't have been surprised if the mountain had erupted! There were hundreds, maybe even thousands - it was too difficult to tell. It was like the queues for the toilets at the Glastonbury Festival. What should have been a relatively short hike to the top (taking two hours max), ended up being a four hour struggle, through the wind, rain and cold. As you can imagine morale was low.

The view from the top was breath-taking. We looked over Yamanashi and Shizuoka prefectures, some of the least developed parts of Japan that I have yet seen. It was beautiful.

The top was crowded and very cold and it wasn't long before we all started heading down in dribs and drabs, skidding down the scree slope at five times the speed of our ascent! We arrived back down at the base camp around 9am.

Tired and emotional I managed to pass out pretty quickly in the baking sun only to be woken up with bouts of bad news about one ALT walking down the wrong path and ending up in the wrong prefecture and bad sunburn! Hee hee. Amanda, the poor ALT in the wrong ken, ended up having to get the train back and we headed off on the 8 hour journey back through the mountains.
A crazy two days. I think I'll put it down to an experience, which I'm glad that I've done, but a repeat performance is unlikely any time soon!