Climbing Mount Fuji is definitely an experience I'll never forget. It pretty much combines every emotion humanly possible into a 10 hour period, making for an incredible ride. My epic Fuji experience started on Friday night, when I crashed at Dan's place thanks to having to catch a ridiculously early train from Shin-Osaka station on Saturday morning :P It was a really awesome night as I got there in time for dinner, and we ordered these ridiculously delicious pizzas from the local pizza store. One of which had whole cloves of garlic on it - devestating, haha. As Dan is leaving this year it was one of the last chances I had to catch up with him, so we talked about all kinds of crap until probably a little bit late in the night, haha. Saturday morning was painful thanks to the late night and ridiculously early start. We had to be up around 5am to catch the subway to Sannomiya and then the train out to Shin-Osaka to meet everyone else. There were 16 of us in total, which was amazing, and before we knew it we were on the Shinkansen and off to Mishima! Emma, our wonderful organising queen, had bought us all discount tickets for a totally awesome price. The catch was that we had to use the Kodama, the slowest shinkansen, which took nearly 3 hours to trundle its way from Shin-Osaka to Mishima. That was fine though, as it'd been a while since we'd all caught up and we had a lot to talk about. In Mishima we caught a bus to Kawaguchi-ko, a beautiful little town at the base of Mount Fuji on the north side. The bus was rather dreadful, taking nearly 3 hours to get there, haha. After seven hours of transport in one day, I was going a bit stir crazy, so was grateful when we finally arrived and settled down for a dericious konbini lunch in the guch. After that we explored the beautiful lake nearby, which had heaps of volcanic rock in and around it. Finally, as the sun started to set, we picked up some BBQ food at a local supermarket and jumped on the bus to our ryokan, out in the sticks. It was a quaint little place, from where we could see Fuji-san looming in the distance. After a dericious BBQ and a trip to the local sento, we were all massively tired so headed to bed around midnight. Heading to bed being the operative word, unfortunately - I didn't actually get any sleep thanks to one of the people in my room snoring all night. Anyway, haha, I tried my best to genk it up and after a quick breakfast of bananas and Snickers bars, ended up feeling fairly ok. Unfortunately, our morning plans from there didn't go quite according to plan, hehe. We'd looked at the wrong bus schedule when planning our escape from Kawaguchi-ko, and realised we were stuck at the ryokan for over an hour until the next bus! Thankfully, Emma worked her magic again and got the ryokan owner to drive us into central Kawaguchi-ko for something ridiculous like 200 yen each, hehe. W00t! Back in the guch we grabbed some food for the trip and prepared to jump onto the bus to head to Fuji Yoshida, the nearby town from where we would start climbing Fuji on the Yoshida Track. Things got a little crazy here as I'd organised to meet my friend, Mariko, at the Fujisengenjijna shrine at the bottom of the Yoshia track. We were already running late and she had arrived, so I didn't want to keep her waiting any longer. I decided to go ahead to Kawaguchi-ko so jumped on a convenient train and was there in 5 minutes. Ironically, though, it turned out that my plans with Mariko had come unstuck in comically enormous proportions. There are many Fujisengenjinjas and 5th stations scattered around Fuji, and although I thought I'd been specific about being on the Fuji-Yoshida side of the mountain, our lines had obviously crossed over somewhere. It turned out that she was actually on the east side of the mountain, having come down from Hakone, where she lives. Whoops! It was going to take her two hours to get around the mountain to Fuji-Yoshida, so we rather amusingly organised to meet on top of the mountain, haha. My friends finally arrived on the bus and we got going, getting to the start of the track at around 10:30am. So finally, we began our climb :) It was easy to begin with, and thanks to having done it before, the trail didn't feel all that long. My bag felt really heavy and I was worried about it, but strangely enough I stopped noticing the weight after a while. We climbed for several hours before arriving at the area where horses used to be stabled when pilgrims climbed the mountain. Here there were some wonderful obaachan volunteers handing out (or rather, forcing us to take) food and water, hehe. We chatted to them for a while before starting up towards 5th station to meet the 5 or so of our group who had bused up instead of climbing. As we climbed through 3rd station, the clouds rolled in and created a really surreal scene. I'd never been in a cloud before and it was a really cool experience - literally and figuratively! :) We finally arrived at 5th station, only to find it was tiny and there was no bus station in sight. Confused, we asked around and found out that the 5th station bus station was actually nearly 2km away, on a different track. Hahaha. Just goes to show that no matter how well you plan, there can always be surprises. It wasn't a big problem though as we had mobile reception so organised to meet our friends at the 7th station hut we were staying at. We hung out at 5th for a while and grabbed some food before continuing up to 7th. As we arrived at 6th station, the tree line very suddenly disappeared and opened up to a post apocalyptic landscape of bare, jagged volcanic rocks. The change was so drastic and immediate that it was almost a shock. The big clouds rolling across the area gave it a really haunting and even spiritual feeling, and I could sense why the ancients held the mountain in such awe and in such a religious light. We took a brief moment here to rest before dodging a few tour groups and continuing on up the mountain. Despite the steep slopes, we really flew up the gap between 6th and 7th station, moving quickly past all of the Japanese people. I was a bit concerned about altitude sickness but I think we'd adjusted as we came up and it was a little too low still to be really affected. And so, we finally arrived at our 7th station hut at around 6pm. It'd taken us about 7.5 hours to climb from Fuji Yoshida to 7th station, which included several long breaks. So not too bad :) The hut itself was pretty classic, a long structure packed with a surprisingly large number of rooms. We had booked out one of the biggest, as we had 16 people. We all managed to squeeze in and met up with Aimee and co, who'd arrived a few hours earlier. After changing out of our disgusting, sweat ridden clothes, we had dinner and tried to get a little bit of sleep. This turned out to be pointless again thanks to more snoring and the noise from other groups who weren't sleeping. In the end, a few of us gave up, packed our bags, put on our winter clothes, pulled out our torches and headed out to start climbing at around 11pm. I remember asking John, one of Dan's friends, exactly what we were doing climbing a mountain in the middle of the night. He laughed and replied by asking what we were doing *queuing* to climb a mountain in the middle of the night. Which was a fair question, as there was a massive queue waiting to filter into the narrow starting section of the climb from 7th station. Thankfully, the path widened after that and we were able to move quite quickly. John and a few of the others shot ahead while I hung back a bit and climbed with my friend Louis. I didn't want to get altitude sickness so decided on the safer, slower climb. It was probably a good thing we did climb slowly though, as we found ourselves exhausted after every few bends in the zigzag track that wound ponderously up to the summit. We saw a lot of people resting or collapsed on the ground as we climbed, many using little bottles of oxygen. We did ok though and didn't need any, and finally reached 8th station. There were about 4 8th stations though, which was demotivating to say the least! We'd be like, woohoo, we're at 8.5 station, but it'd turn out to be 8.25. And so on. But we finally cleared the last '8th station' and the summit was in sight! Unfortunately, this was the area the track got a lot narrower, so the line here was insane. Thanks to a few other lines and having to rest a lot, it took nearly 4 hours to climb from our 7th station hut to just above the final 8th station. It then took another 1.5 hours to get up the short distance to the summit. This was extremely frustrating, to say the least, especially given that I hadn't slept in nearly 48 hours. I finally got through the line though, just as the sun was rising, and risking altitude sickness I ran across the top of the summit and found a little spot to sit at the highest part of the crater. The view off the top was absolutely stunning, as a carpet of clouds ran out to the horizon in all directions. We were also so high that we could clearly see the curvature of the earth - pretty humbling! I hadn't actually been on the summit for the very beginning of the sun rise, but I saw most of it :) It was definitely a very unique and beautiful view. A little bit overhyped, as it wasn't *that* special, but I'm extremely glad I did it and it's something I can tick off on my list of things to do in Japan. Our group had been separated on the mountain so I think that only about half of us actually made it to the summit for the sunrise. Most people had arrived by around 5:30am, by which time I was feeling very much under the weather. Lack of sleep, altitude, cold temperatures and food poisoning combined to make me very unhappy, and all I wanted to do was get off the mountain. The others were going to wait around for everyone else to arrive at the top, but Louis and I wanted to head straight down and go home, so we said goodbye to everyone and started down. I needed to use the bathroom so ran ahead of Louis and ended up losing him, so in the end I decided to head down myself. Heading down was a lot faster than climbing, but it was also very difficult. The track was comprised of lots of loose volcanic rock that was really hard on the knees to walk down! I had run out of water and my stomach was very unhappy, and at this point everything just swarmed up and overwhelmed me. I can quite safely say that it was one of the most miserable points in my life, hahaha. I was a little happier when I finally got onto some flat ground and I could see the tree line just a little further down. To my great relief, I finally stumbled onto the Fujisubaru track, which led to the bus station. It was quite a walk, but the clouds rolled up and were a beautiful change to the steep rock slopes I'd been descending, which were rapidly heating up in the summer sun. I finally got to the bus station at around 8:30am, about 2.5 hours after I'd started descending. A bus was there waiting and was surprisingly not too full, so I jumped on and rode the hour out talking to a random Australian guy who'd also climbed Fuji. At Kawaguchi-ko station I grabbed some much needed food (I hadn't eaten for over 12 hours and had used a lot of energy climbing and descending) and managed to find a sento to clean up at. I felt much better after that and jumped on the next bus to Mishima station. It was around noon when I got on the bus and we arrived at Mishima at just before 3pm. I was in a pretty bad way during the bus trip, haha. Not really surprising, I suppose, given that I'd had about 7 hours sleep in the past 77 hours. I kept dozing off but it was only an extremely light sleep in which I'd have extremely vivid dreams, most of which were really weird. I expect I was probably talking in my sleep and moving around in my seat as well, hehe, so I must have looked like the village gaijin idiot :P Still, I got there in the end! The shinkansen connection at Mishima was very convenient and before I knew it I was in Shin-Osaka, having done my crazy dream-sleep thing again. It was pushing 6pm and by this point I was in absolutely no condition to stand on a train for 2 hours to get back to Ako. So I bought another Shinkansen ticket to Aioi, hehe. It wasn't too expensive, and it was so much faster and more comfortable that it was worth it. I forgot that I could only use a Kodama to get to Aioi, though, and had jumped on a Hikari. As a result I had to get off at Himeji, but it was only an extra 20 minutes on the train so it could have been worse. I finally, finally got back to Ako at about 8:30pm. I managed to haul myself down to Minato-ya for a quick dinner before heading home and going straight to sleep. All in all, a really good weekend. The pain of descending and the trip home is something I will never forget, but it was definitely worth the experience. The exercise along was worth it, hehe. I would recommend climbing Fuji to anyone, although I would suggest going later in the season and making sure that you set out from 7th station no later than 10pm. And as the saying goes, you're a fool not to climb Fuji but you're a bigger fool if you climb it more than once. I certainly won't be, but it's a major Japanese experience ticked off my list.