Fuji Post 1 - The details

Amy and I climbed Mt. Fuji on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Since it was my idea to climb it, I felt like I was obligated to do most of the planning. Normally I don't handle this sort of thing. Your Kevin Skobacs, David Shutoffs, and Daniela Jacobson-Frieds are usually much better at this stuff than your Benn Egans. If I had traveled alone, I wouldn't have thought about it for a second and just headed off into the general direction of Mt. Fuji, caution to the wind. I'm glad that I did research this to some degree though, because before I started reading it hadn't occurred to me to take a flashlight even though I knew that most of the climbing would happen between 11pm and 5am.

My plan was to take the JR Tokaido Shinkansen (bullet train to the lay person) from Nagoya Station to Shin-Fuji Station in Shizuoka prefecture. Everything I read told me this would cost no more than 4,000 yen. I even made a phone call to Nagoya Station and some woman quoted me 3,410 yen for a non-reserved ticket on one of the two trains that leave every :13 and :33 past the hour. A bus could be taken to the mountain from Shin-Fuji 'until pretty late' according to someone's blog. I tried to call the bus station in Shin-Fuji but no one there spoke English and I didn't really attempt to explain in Japanese what I wanted. So then I looked at some advice on what to pack and was after able to relax, the trip having been all but a guaranteed success. Such a perfectly planned trip the world had not yet seen.

Amy got out of work at 5:40pm but we weren't able to meet on the Kyowa train station platform until 7:15pm. I had packed a flashlight, extra batteries, some candy, 2 liters of water, a waterproof shell, 2 sweatshirts, my iPod, camera, roll of toilet paper, sunglasses, bandana, knit hat, and sunscreen. Amy packed inari and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich past what I had. We took the 8:01 Shinkansen (not the 8:13 or the 8:33 which I had been told were the only ones available) for 6,800 yen and change, which was $30 more expensive than for what I had planned. It took an hour and a half to reach Shin-Fuji. When we arrived everything there had already closed down for the night. I asked a Shinkansen employee where we could catch the Fuji-shuttle and he said across the street. Starting tomorrow morning at 9.

I asked some cabbies how much it would cost to get to Fuji and the first guy said 7,000 yen but it wasn't clear to where on the mountain he would be taking us. The second guy said 10,000 yen but made it very clear that it was to the exact spot I wanted to go. Sold. So instead of taking the 2,400 yen bus we were splitting a 10,000 yen cabride. We got to the fifth station on the mountain, Fujinomiya trail, by 10:50pm. This, somehow, was exactly the time I had planned on starting our hike.

Naturally, the further up the mountain you go, the colder it gets. The average difference in temperature between the base and the peak is 68 degrees Fahrenheit. So, even at the fifth station we noticed a considerable difference in temperature.

The hike usually takes 4 and a half hours to the top from the fifth station (the fifth station is where 'nearly all climbers start from' according to my Lonely Planet). There are little huts to rest at on the mountain but it wasn't clear what we could expect from them. So Amy I put on our waterproof stuff because it had started to rain a little bit (it rains often on Fuji so we weren't surprised or unprepared) and I got out of my flashlight (she hadn't brought one) and we started up the mountain. We bypassed the first station altogether because it hadn't stopped raining and we wanted to keep moving. We decided to stop at the 7th station and rest for a bit because we were both quite wet at that point (it STILL hadn't stopped raining and the wind was getting worse the higher we went). It turns out that at every station on the mountain you have to pay to rest. At station 7, to be in the warm hut for any reason, it was going to cost us 1,000 yen per person, per hour. We decided to wait outside the hut under the eaves, slightly out of the rain and wind, for just long enough to catch our breath and eat Amy's PB&J sandwich. I contributed these little brownies that I had bought back in Kyowa. Because of the altitude and the difference in air pressure inside and outside of the package, it had swollen up and looked ready to burst. We were feeling a lot better after we had eaten something and started back up the mountain. At this point, we were completely drenched and getting quite cold. Amy commented that she was glad that her iPod and digital camera were safely wrapped up in a plastic bag. I had neglected to do the same. I checked quickly and yes, of course, they were both wet and I was convinced at that point, ruined. I moved my stuff to her plastic bag and was ready to pitch someone over the side of the mountain in misplaced aggression. With a little bit of luck though, it would stop raining soon and everything would be OK. Such was not the case.

We were on the mountain from 10:50pm on Wednesday until 8:00am on Thursday, and it rained, non-stop, for that entire period. Hiking in the darkness, in the rain, without many other people on the trail, in strong winds, is something that I don't want to do again for a long time. The trip itself was great and I'm glad that I did it, but the actual hiking was exhausting and miserable.

We made it to the eighth station alright but the longer we hiked, the further behind Amy fell. As I was the only one with a flashlight, she was in complete darkness for most of the trip. We kept switching places so we could share the light, but as she didn't want to carry it, it was unavoidable that she spent most of the time hiking without seeing the trail. I'm amazed she didn't sprain her ankle or something because Fuji is composed entirely of loose rocks and things to trip on.

We reached the 8th station at around 2:25am and there were quite a few people resting there. We met some people who spoke Portugese and they told us in broken English that there was a restaurant inside of the station and it opened at 3am. Amy and I waited for half an hour in the downpour and wind, huddled together near a glowing vending machine, in what was easily the lowest point of the trip thus far. When the station opened up, about 20 of us poured inside and paid out the ass for hot coffee, rice and what not. I got a bowl of plan white rice for 500 yen. Amy got coffee for 400 yen but her hand was shaking so badly that she spilled some of it. I got some video with my camera at that point and if I can figure out how to post it, you'll all have a chance to see it before I come home.

From station 8, it was about an hour to the top, so we waited until we could reach the summit at sunrise, and started out again. Putting on cold and wet clothes after you've dried out a little bit will always be one of the worst things that you can do to yourself.

We made it to the summit right after 4:30am, but thanks to the rain we couldn't see the sunrise. The summit was freezing cold, literally, and we didn't stay there too long. It was obvious that the rain wasn't going to stop any time soon so we bought a few souvenirs from a little stand and had our picture taken in front of the Shinto shrine. I think being at the summit and facing the descent was the low point of the trip for Amy. We stood together in the back of the souvenir shop, shaking violently, and I think I saw her tear up a little bit. She's tough, and did very little complaining or bitching during the trip, but I could tell that she was hurting at that point. She beat it down though like a champ and we ventured back out into the rain to hike back down. For almost 40 minutes right after we left the top, it stopped raining. The sky opened up a little bit and we could make out the ground below us, the sunlight, and some of the higher clouds off into the distance. It was exactly what we needed right then. We dug our cameras out and got the pictures that we had climbed the mountain to take. I've posted everything of mine on Flickr, and I'll add Amy's pictures when I get them.

The rain started again but as we got lower the cold was becoming less severe. We got back down to station 5 in about 2 and a half hours and then had to wait for an hour for the next bus back to Shin-Fuji. The next 7 hours would be spent dripping wet on buses and local trains. Thanks to the lack of dry clothing (it wouldn't have mattered even if I had packed some because my bag did a poor job of keeping the water out) I discovered a couple of nascent rashes when I got back to Kyowa in addition to the sore muscles, bumps, and scrapes. After a hot shower and a 6-hour nap, I went out to meet Amy, Carmen, David, and Tom at a bar in Kyowa before coming here to post everything.

The trip was uncomfortable and one that I'll probably find stuff of mine wrecked from in the days to come, but that was all part of why it was also so enjoyable. I would recommend to any and everyone to climb it, even, as we did, in a typhoon.