A wise man climbs Fuji-san once, a fool attempts the climb twice.
--Japanese proverb
Those ancient Japanese were onto something. We'd all heard the sunrise view from the top of Fuji was a once-in-a-lifetime awesome experience. And maybe it is. I wouldn't know. But we were lured by this nonetheless, and so Saturday night around 8 we arrived at the 5th station (about 2000 m up), all pumped and ready to climb. "We" were a handful of SCTI people, plus a whole bunch of UC people Rajiv knew and a couple Keio students we knew, whom we would all bond with a lot that night.
After paying $.50 to use the bathrooms, cleaning out all the shops of their food, and eating some really awful udon, we got ready to set off. The first warning sign was that two of the women--someone whose name starts with K and someone with Pooh obsession--didn't bring warm clothes. (One thought she could hike all night on Fuji in a short-sleeve T-shirt.) We managed to find enough extra shirts and stuff for them and started off. The weather wasn't too bad, although the wind started picking up and blowing dirt in our faces. By the time we reached the eighth station around 1 AM, it had begun misting and we started hearing reports that it was getting dangerous to go further. By then our group had splintered into a few groups.
The baka: (stupid)
Jonathan, Rajiv, and some guy from UC went all the way up to the summit. By the time we got there they were already at the ninth station, and Rajiv called to tell us (yes, cell phones even work on the top of Mt. Fuji... gotta love Japan...) it wasn't that hard to keep going. We were tempted to believe him but the wind was picking up and the innkeeper at the 8th station was telling us visibility was near zero. But they went up anyway, and as you can see in Jonathan's blog, they nearly died trying.
We decided that we didn't really want to risk it, and seeing it getting cloudier (and now pitch black on the trail) we figured we wouldn't be able to see the sunrise from any higher up anyway. The innkeeper wanted $50 to let us spend the few hours left till sunrise inside, which most of us balked at. So we took shelter against the wall outside, cuddling together for shared body heat. Amazing how in survival situations like this all inhibitions disappear and people you just met are now lying on top of you to keep warm.
As the hours went by, a second group, the
okanemochi (rich), decided to plunk down the money for the slightly warmer (but definitely drier) inn. Eventually, Audrey, Crystal, Jeff Yao, and the Keio people caved.
The bimbo: (poor) The rest of us were hunkering down both against the strengthening storm and the evil innkeeper. He came out to yell at us for blocking a part of his entrance, as if we were keeping a flood of people from getting in. After his rant about how this was private property (in curiously good, but obviously rehearsed English), we moved down the wall and further into the direct wind. Now it was starting to rain and we were getting wet. Before long the inn filled up and the demon innkeeper started turning people away.
Eventually we spied this big tarp lying around that no one was using. So being the enterprising engineers we were, we made ourselves a little makeshift tent. And it was nice and dry--and warm. We were just mastering the art of keeping it against the wind and thinking this wouldn't be that bad a way to spend the night when a strong force started tugging at the tarp. We fought against it but next thing we knew we were looking at the innkeeper, grinning ear to ear as he tore our shelter away. He then proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes trying to fold it up in the gale-force winds. The man came out of his packed little inn into this powerful storm just to torment a few gaijin who couldn't pay for a night's stay even if they wanted to.
The rain was getting harder, and a couple of the women were now shivering uncontrollably. So we decided to head back down the mountain. Which was not easy since it was a) night, b) windy, and c) wet and slippery. We passed a number of people who told us we were crazy. And we didn't all have working flashlights by that point. But in a testament to just how much we'd bonded over the past few hours huddling against the wind, some real teamwork emerged as we shared the light and helped each other down. At each stop along the way we checked for the prospect of shelter. But each time we were turned away, and even shushed so the guests inside could sleep.
Around 4, in front of one of the seventh-station inns,
Christine was on the brink of hypothermia. So she and Tim spent the night there (fortunately this inn was the first we reached willing to take in a freezing girl) and the rest of us continued. About half an hour later we came across another inn whose owner was still up and on inquiry offered us $4 cocoa. A small price to get out of the rain, we reasoned, so we stayed there until the sunrise, if you could call it that. But despite the fact that he could plainly see we were soaking wet (we all stripped off our outer two or three layers as soon as we walked in) he left the window open and later threw the door wide open, in a not-so-subtle attempt to get us to leave. But he was mostly absorbed with radioing weather observations about the storm (observations that might have been useful had we be informed of them on the way up) so he didn't seem to care.
The sunrise was pretty
bimio (not-so-good), but the sky did become brighter--it went from black to gray. Not really feeling that much warmer, we resolved to keep moving, emboldened by visibility. We made it to the bottom by 7, as the winds became brutal. The warm "rest house" felt soo good after all that.
Vince and the UC people bailed on the first bus out, along with a mass exodus of people who were finding the winds too strong to climb up. By noon no one was trying to go up anymore. So Karen and I waited to hear from everyone else. It didn't help that the cell phones, which worked perfectly on top of the mountain, here worked only outside at this one point where the winds seemed to attack you from all sides. I kept venturing out trying in vain to contact people, staying outside as long as I could bear.
By chance I saw Audrey on one of these trips, who had left the okanemochi to try and find the baka, only to find the winds which were bad enough down here making it really unsafe to go to the summit. A few hours later, again by chance outside, I ran into Jonathan, who was so happy to be alive he promptly fell asleep at our refugee center upstairs. Eventually everyone else made it down, and Christine seemed healthy if a bit tired. Really it is nothing short of a miracle that we all made it down alive.
Were this an American national park, we certainly would have heard about life-threatening conditions like these somewhere along the way. But no. For a national icon and frequently climbed attraction, there's nothing hospitable or tourist-friendly about this mountain. Shop and inn owners extort as much money as they can out of people and don't really give a toot about the ones not paying, be they freezing or not. The restaurants all sucked, and there was not a trash can anywhere at any of the stations we stopped at. The information desk and every other store clerk feigned ignorance about the buses, telling us to go stand in the massive line for simple questions about the schedule, as if it changed every day.
We all solemnly (with varying degrees of cursing) vowed never to return to that mountain. In the end we got a few nice views...at the bottom of our climb. That's right--we could have hiked half an hour up, stayed there, and seen more than the people who went to the summit. Y'arrrgh...
But the weekend wasn't all pain and near-death experiences... we started off on an overnight bus to Tokyo. The idea behind the overnight bus is that you can sleep on it; you get on at 10 in Kyoto, and wake up at 6 in Tokyo. So why does the freakin' bus stop every two hours? Do you really need a rest stop if you're asleep? Of course, since I woke up each time they turned on the lights and stopped the bus I actually got off once, but still...
The parade consisted of a few kids' marching bands (yawn), some half-naked dancers dancing nothing that even remotely resembled salsa, and...pirates? Volleyball players? Judo students? So it was that, unimpressed, we conga-lined out of there. (Seriously, it got people to get out of our way...)