Day 8 - Climb Mt Fuji
An early start ready to catch the bus and start climbing that mountain!
Although, now that its over with I wish we'd taken an earlier bus, you'll see why later in this post.
We arrived at the 5th station around 9:15am, picked up our sticks, had a little look around and a bathroom stop before starting our hike up to the top of the mountain.
We rushed it at first and we're out of breath way before the 6th station, at one point a woman said to me 'slow and steady' before speeding passed me. Funnily enough though, around 5-10min later she turned back and went back down the mountain! We can only assume its because she's a speedy hiker but has no interest in the actual climbing parts.
At first I hated the climbing parts, but they were actually the easiest, quickest parts and soon became my favourite. I have no interest in hiking, especially not in the heat, its way too tiring.
Unfortunately, the height and air dropping didn't sit well with my fiancé who kept needing to take more and more breaks the higher we got. So in the end we got to the original eighth station before we needed to turn back to catch our last bus back to the hotel. In the end though, we made it back to the 5th station an hour earlier than we'd expected to, but i'm still glad we headed back when we did. It gets very dark very early in Japan in August, so within about half an hour we were descending in complete darkness. We'd rented our kit from Kobe Outdoor and it came with a couple of head torches, they were a big help but they're still not as good as daylight or street lamps!
After about 5 min of walking down with the torches on we bumped into a couple who asked if they could descend with us as they didn't have any lights and it was pitch black by this point - and there are no fences on the outsides of the mountain trail so it is ridiculously dangerous. The signposts aren't lit either so it would be very easy to head off the trail in the dark.
So in the end, we didn't have time to make it to the top and we're missing maybe two or three stamps from our sticks as we had to leave 90min from the summit, but it was quite the experience, but I don't think hiking or mountain climbing is for me.
Just a side note, as I know I Googled a lot before we left for Japan - if you're planning on hiking Mt Fuji but are wondering how to get these 1.5m sticks home, we put ours in a tentpole bag from Halfords and checked it in with our airline. They survived two flights, just let them know they're fragile when you check them in and they should be one of the last items they put on the plane. When they came off the belt though, the bag was ripped open, but we'd put two luggage belts around the bag so it was all held together still. We'd also asked in the postoffice but they wouldn't post them back in a bag and didn't sell any sort of packing materials.
Click here to see the next day.
Click here to see the previous day.
Comments
Post a Comment