A Fujian Adventure
Trip Start
Apr 03, 2005
1
16
Trip End
Jul 31, 2005
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Mt. Fuji, Japan
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
We left our dorm at about 5:30pm on Thursday and headed to the base of Mt. Fuji in the town of Gotemba. After the two hour train ride to Gotemba we rode in a cab for another hour to the trail head of the route we had planned to take. Fuji is laid out with five different routes to the top, each with a different difficulty and popularity. Each trail is laid out with stations on it that serve as rest points on the climb. On each of the routes you can take a taxi to the fifth station and then walk from there. Each route's climb ends at the tenth station, on the summit. In between are several stations (not just a sixth, seventh, eights, and ninth as it turns out) that have all kinds of goodies including futons if you feel the need for a nap. The way the wealthier people tend to attack Fuji is to actually climb up to one of the higher stations the day before, rent a futon for the night and then wake up at 3am to finish the climb and catch the sunrise. We felt we were ballsier than this...were we right?? Read on my good man!!
Sorry. So we started our climb at the fifth station of the second most popular route at about 8:30pm with our flashlights and walking sticks in hand. About an hour later we had reached the sixth station, ahead of schedule! We were feeling good, especially because apparently we were going so fast. We continued to walk, and in about another 45 minutes we saw another station appear. We were feeling good thinking that this was station seven and that we only had three more to go! Except for one thing...when we got to this building we read the sign and saw that it was really only station 6.5...what!? There're decimal stations?! OHHH GOD WHY!? Yeah. To make matters worse I was beginning to feel the affects of the altitude a bit, and my friend Megan was beginning to REALLY feel the affects. I was slightly light headed, but Megan was beginning to get nauseous.
After leaving this evil station 6.5 we started up the steep barren side of the volcano. Until now we had been in low laying brush and hadn't been climbing on that treacherous of a trail...but now. It was just us, the rocky side of Fuji, and a straight shot to the top. We could actually see the bright lights of all of the other stations straight above us staring down. They didn't even seem that far! Boy, were we wrong...after about an hour we hit station seven. At this point Megan was feeling so crappy that she had to lay down for a bit. After resting we headed out again, but we were slowing down as Megan began to feel worse. Now her legs were burning because her body couldn't get enough air to her muscles...standard altitude stuff. Another 30 min and we were at station 7.5...UGH! WHY!? After 7.5 we had slowed to a crawl as poor Meg had to stop to regain composure every few yards.
By station eight Meg said that she couldn't go on any more, especially considering it was supposed to be another few hours to the top. Poor Meg...she looked miserable by this point. She ended up renting a futon for a few hours at this station so she could acclimate, and the two remaining members of the brigade from the U.S., Siuchi and I, raced to the top to beat the sunrise (we were running behind schedule at this point). But here's where Fuji turns into your typical weird Japanese experience. At around 3am, all those rich Japanese people who had rented out beds from the night before at stations eight, 8.5, and nine, began to wake up and crowd the trail to the top as they also tried to beat the sunrise. It got so crowded that the trail actually ground to a stop as people waited in line to get to the summit. That's right. A line. I shouldn't have been surprised by this as you tend to wait in a lot of lines in Japan. Except this is nature! I never EVER expected to wait in line for nature...not even in Japan! And you know what? I wasn't about to start.
Siuchi and I were starting to panic as the sky was starting to get lighter and we decided to screw this line crap. We just walked next to the line and passed people. We were cutting corners, crawling over rocks, just doing everything we could to get to the top before the sunrise. This isn't as offensive as it sounds as the trail is quite wide and could have easily supported more people doing what we were doing, and we weren't the only ones doing it either. I just really think a lot of Japanese people are perfectly content waiting in line...even for nature! I don't know how long we did this for as we were so worried we were going to miss the sunrise we didn't check the time (but probably almost two hours or so), but it worked! We finally made it to the top around 4:15am...with half an hour to spare. Doh! I guess we panicked too much. But we got good seats for the sunrise and it was a site. Not only was the sunrise beautiful, but just the view from the top was absolutely breath taking. You can see amazingly far in all directions as Fuji is just so much higher than anything nearby. You feel like you're in a plane looking down at the countryside below. But there is a depressing side of this glorious view: we could see the trail, and all the stations that we had killed ourselves to reach on our climb up. In the light we realized that these stations couldn't have been more than ¼ mile apart. Ugh! It was depressing to see over what little distance we struggled the night before.
Well after enjoying the sunrise, I began to feel a bit woozy. A few minutes later I felt downright nauseous. I went to go lie down in one of the restaurants (yeah, restaurants) that are set up in the huts on the summit. I continued to lie there until around 8am when Megan finally caught up with us, even though she was still feeling miserable. After allowing her to rest, but with both of us still feeling miserable, we began to climb down so we could get out of the thin air. When we reached station 8.5 I sat down for a break, closed my eyes for five minutes, opened them, stood up, and felt fine. 100%. No problem. It was the weirdest thing; it was as if I was never sick! And we couldn't have been more than a few hundred feet from the summit.
A few stations later, Megan began to feel better and then our whole group was fine! Amazing...the rest of the climb was long, and we were so glad when it was over. We caught a cab, then a train, then a short walk back to our dorm. We all took showers and then passed out. Ugh, what a day.
