Mt. Fuji

Now that the word is out, I suppose most of you want to know about our trip up (and down) Fuji. We didn’t tell anyone we were climbing, because we were a bit worried that I wouldn’t make it up, due to my asthma, so we managed to keep it a secret – even from those of you who asked directly.

We spent the morning with the Harajuku girls in Tokyo, then took a train to the Fuji area and arrived around five. It took us a while to change clothes, repack our backpacks, and get our luggage into a locker for the night. We took a bus from the train station at the bottom of Mt. Fuji to the fifth station, the place where most people begin their hike. It was a bright, sunny, and mostly clear day; when we reached the fifth station, we could actually see the top of the mountain. After taking some ‘before’ pictures, buying some more supplies (like some rain gear – just in case), and a nutritious dinner of overpriced hotdogs, we started our trek around seven thirty in the evening. It was dark, but there were plenty of other hikers, so we managed without our flashlights for the first while.

The beginning of the walk is fairly nice – like walking in a park at night. The moon and stars were bright, and it was refreshing to be able to see the night sky. We could see the trees below, and the stations lit up to the top. We made it to the sixth station (the one that Paul and Raj ‘missed’) in about 45 minutes, and were quite proud of our speedy pace. By then, we were above the tree line, and our path was becoming more ‘up’ than ‘across,’ slowly zig-zagging from one point to the next. At one point, I heard fireworks and looked around and saw them – far, far below us in some small town in the valley.

We stopped at the seventh station a little over an hour later. I got a stamp on my hiking stick, and we ate some of the trail mix we had packed. It was cold enough then for jackets and dark enough for flashlights. Somewhere around the beginning of our hike, Paul had mentioned that there was a part of the trail ‘where you have to use your hands.’ (Strangely, after reading on Mt. Fuji and talking about the trip for six weeks, this had never really come up.) This part came after the seventh station: the path became less like walking uphill and more like climbing – finding your footing and keeping your balance.

It was kind of fun – like climbing up a big rock – having to think about where to put your feet and hands. But with the atmospheric changes, combined with tiredness, it felt a bit more like shuffling blindly than boldly climbing. Armed with the better flashlight and walking stick, I left Paul in the dust. It was a nice feeling. After all, I’m the one who works out, so it’s only fair that I could win some race.

Somewhere in the enormous distance between the seventh and eighth station, we were suddenly joined by several large groups of tourists. We knew that this would likely happen on some part of our trip, but it was amazing how they seemed to come from nowhere. The path became crowded and annoying. Waiting for Paul at the lower eighth station, I saw a group of people sitting outside, all cozied up in their sleeping bags. We had planned to sleep for a few hours in one of the huts on the mountain, but hadn’t planned to sleep outside in the cold mountain air. Paul remarked that we may have to join those sleeping outside, should the tour groups take up all the sleeping space in the huts. I laughed – and then went to work passing them on our way up the mountain, determined to have a roof over my head for a few hours that night.

At 11:30, we asked for beds at a hut, but they were all full. We raced along to the next station and got a bed around midnight. Perhaps bed is a generous term – we got two sleeping bags in a room with twenty-five sleeping bags, and two rock-like pillows covered in Ziploc bags. It wasn’t the best sleep either of us had had. I felt like I was sleeping on the side of a mountain – far, far away from land and flat places. It’s a strange sensation to feel altitude while you’re lying down.

We awoke at four to see the sunrise. Sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji is supposed to be magnificent – the reason why everyone climbs at night. We had seen some fantastic sunrise pictures on the internet, but, I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed at the sunrise. It was nice, but it wasn’t as breathtaking as I had imagined. Of course, that could be because of the very minimal amount of sleep I had had, the $4 Dixie Cup of coffee I was drinking, combined with the cold, cold wind, and the knowledge that we hadn’t yet reached the top.

We set out around five, and I felt sick almost immediately. The height of the mountain made the walk difficult for everyone around us. We would manage walking for about two minutes before a rest. Our pace slowed quite a bit from the night before. I never thought we’d get to the top. The sun was shining very brightly, and we could see quite a distance from where we were standing. The mountain itself was an earthy red color.

After three and a half hours of morning hiking, we finally made it to the top, which is made up of a little village of restaurants and souvenir shops. We went in to a restaurant, and I collapsed. Paul ordered and ate his lunch while I was sleeping. Eventually, I woke up, ate lunch, and wrote postcards. Revived, we wandered over to the post office, stopping to look into the crater on our way. Eventually, after mailing our postcards and taking many pictures, we were ready for our descent.

Ready perhaps isn’t the best word to describe our feelings. It might be better to say that we knew it was time to go down, we knew that if we didn’t leave, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel at a decent time. From the top of the mountain, the path zig-zags slowly down; you can see how dreadfully far it is. This was the worst part. The loose, rocky dirt was hard to walk on – it was far more difficult to find a grip with our legs and feet on this path than the one the night before – like sloshing through dirt, the same sort of inertia that comes when walking through a big slushy snowfall. After one zig, Paul had blisters, and I was ready to quit. “I can’t do this,” I told him, as though I hoped he would say, “why don’t we just wait for the elevator.” But there was no elevator, and we couldn’t stay forever on the mountain. The soles on my shoes were so worn and my legs so tired that I kept a snails pace. It was warm – the sun is so close up there, so bright – you feel… exposed. I felt miserable. Looking down and seeing the path, it felt like it would be forever before we got down. People passed us – people with hiking shoes, people without hiking shoes, people with children. An entire little-league baseball team passed us, and I still couldn’t pick up my pace, or believe any harder that I would ever get to the bottom of the mountain. Paul chose this point to ask if I was proud of what I had done and happy that we had done it. I informed him that I was certainly not proud or happy – I was miserable and regretting that I had let him talk me in to such nonsense. We didn’t talk much after that.

Eventually, the end was in sight (at least for Paul, that is, I don’t think I believed we would finish until we actually did). A bus was coming in forty-five minutes, and we decided to race the rest of the way back to the fifth station. We didn’t run – I can’t even really describe it as moving quickly – but we moved with purpose through the crowds of people at the beginning of their climb. I felt bad for them. Paul ran (that is, he moved quicker than I did) back to the station to buy tickets – the bus took off two minutes after I got to the station, five hours after we had started our descent. I have never been so filthy in my life. My hair, which I had kept under my hat the whole time we were on the mountain, was nothing but a mass of tangles, and when I finally took off my shoes in the train station restroom, out came my own little mountain of dirt.