Fuji-san

(Note: Blogger's not letting me add pictures right now, so here you go, just two pictures for now)

Sooooo Monday begins. I get up early-ish, but only by my standards; I know almost every person reading this works at a real job, and gets up at 6 or 7am every day. I got up at probably around 9am, and I tried to take it easy to begin with. I had made some slight preparations for the trip up Fuji, but I needed to get some more food for sure, as well as sunblock, so I leisurely strolled from my hostel to the bus station that would take me up to “Kawaguchi-ko 5th station”, which was a halfway point up the mountain of sorts. Although you can hike from the very bottom of the mountain, most people opt to start from the fifth station, which starts at about 2,300meters up or 7,000 feet, roughly, and the summit is at 3,700 meters, or about 12,000 feet. The estimate of the hike up from the fifth station is around 4-8 hours, and then 2-4 hours down, double both of those numbers to get the figures for people starting from the very bottom.

Although I had a certain desire in me for purism, I was pressed for time, so pragmatism won over, and I was certainly going to start from the fifth station. I made a point of getting some sweets and about four litres of water, as well as some meats and cheese, and a small bottle of California wine with which to celebrate the summiting, and then got screwed over on a small bottle of sunblock, and was ready to go. I also considered getting a walking stick; there are these wooden walking sticks that are pretty heavily associated with the climbing of Mt. Fuji, and I’ll get to them more later, but basically I decided that 10 dollars for a light piece of wood was a bit much, so I decided for the time being to forego it.

I got my ticket and waited at the bus stop. There was a white guy standing next to me that looked affable enough, so I said hello to him. Turned out that he spoke English quite well, though he was German by way of France and Belgium, which is to say that he spent most of his life living in the latter two despite being of origin from the first.

His name is Dominic, and we ended up spending the entire climb up together.

It was about an hour bus ride to Kawaguchi-ko fifth station, and when I got there, it looked a lot like the ski resort town of Mammoth. Here's a picture:

There was a crappy souvenir shop, as there always is, and some overprice ration supplies, as there always is in such circumstances, and there was an ominous entrance to the trail, pictured below:

There were also horses. I’m still not exactly sure how far those horses carry people up the mountain, but I saw clumps of horseshit pretty high up, and smelled it even higher. So, your guess is as good as mine, but it seemed like people were quite happy to forego any actual work and just have the beasts of burden take care of it for them.

There’s not a ton to say about the next four and a half hours, which is how long it took for us to get to the top. If any of you have ever hiked a long trail, you would know what I mean. This isn’t exactly a “its not the destination, it’s the journey” situation. Its actually quite the opposite, though you hope parts of the journey will be memorable as well. But the four and a half hours of slogging it to the top were in service of getting to the main attraction.

Some of the highlights from that journey, nevertheless, include seeing countless packs of Japanese people with tour groups going up the mountain. It seemed that every one of these packs was a veritably demographically accurate slice of Japan, representing the young, the old, the very young, the very old, some people in the middle, and of course both genders.

Fuji has a bit of a reputation for getting traffic jams along the way, and these guys are why. Any other big mountain in the world, and they just wouldn’t be there. They’d be either watching Saturday morning cartoons, knitting, or looking at stocks. But alas, this isn’t the rest of the world, it’s Mount Fuji, and Japanese people like being able to say they’ve been to Mount Fuji, and who can blame them?

The thing is, that’s just it. They like saying they’ve been there. Most Japanese people take it for granted that going to the top of Fuji is basically craziness, and suffice with doing a small hike up a portion of it, then coming back down, if even that much. The bus ride to the fifth station, then dallying for a few minutes on the trail is enough for a lot of people also.

This mentality is totally foreign to me, but apparently its quite common there. In fact, according to the statistics I’ve read, less than 1% of Japanese people have been to Fuji, let alone summited it. Most of the 300,000 people a year that get to the top are actually from other countries. Go figure?

Other than the traffic jams, there’s a prolific number of way stations, plus a particular way station that is really a complex of several, going up switchbacks for a big portion of the mountain (that one would be 7th station). Each one of them has vending machines, with increasing prices as you go higher, bathrooms that you’re supposed to pay 200 yen (about 2 dollars) to use, which I didn’t bother paying, restaurants that serve slightly pricey ramen and such, souvenirs, and even a place to sleep. A lot of people come to the mountain to see the sunrise, such as I had previously said that I had planned on doing, hence all the inns. Apparently, two guys that I’ll be introducing to you later that I met the next day in this chronology actually stayed at one of these inns, and there aren’t really lodgings in the normal sense, but rather a series of sleeping bags, crammed together, overlapping ever so slightly, as much as they can get away with, basically. Which, on the top of Mount Fuji, pretty far away from all other systems of normalization and authority, you can get away with a whole lot.

The other main thing you see at these way stations are the climbing sticks that I promised earlier to talk about again. I'll post a picture of mine later.

The staff itself cost about 1000 yen, or 10 dollars, and you’ll notice a few stamps on it. Each stamp is actually a branding, to most accurately describe it, as a metal stamp tool is held in a fire before applying to the piece of wood. Each of these stamps are unique to one of the stations, so ideally you collect all of them as you go up, proving you went through each station, or whatever. I thought it looked pretty cool, but each stamp costs 200 yen (2 dollars), so, not wanting to pay 40 dollars for a piece of wood, I decided I’d just pick a few I liked, plus the one you get at the summit. Although it’s a little arbitrary, in my mind, I would like to say that the money for this specifically came from Sheri, as per her instructions, so thanks for that, if you’re reading!

What was crazy is that you’d seem some families of 3, 4, or even 5 people who each had a staff with all the stamps. You’re talking about like hundreds of dollars, when you get right down to it! That’s crazy! Or at least, in my scroogey McScrooge mind, it is.

And that’s pretty much it, as far as the climb up goes. Dominic and I met a few other people on the way up, including a massive German lady who seemed to be climbing at the same pace as us, just with slightly differing break times, who eventually chickened out and used a tram to go up the mountain (yes, there is a tram that goes at least from the 5th station up to the top, and people DO use it extensively. This also probably explains the preponderance of vending machines), as well as a guy from Los Angeles, and a couple at the top who were American, but based out of Okinawa due to the husband being in the navy.

For what its worth, here are some pictures of the climb up:

At the very top, we were treated to a spectacular view of a lot of clouds. Pretty, puffy clouds, but clouds nevertheless. I had sort of hoped I’d be able to see some of Japan from the top, but the weather just wasn’t having it that day. That’s okay, it still made for a nice image, as evidenced here:

I had also brought up some nice little celebratory treats to the top, including a small package of sliced sausage and cheeses (muenster and brie, I believe) and a small battle of wine, which Dominic split with me and was most grateful for; he also contributed a portion of his Belgian chocolate to the affair, and it was a rather nice respite from the climb, and a good way to get recharged for the climb back down.

Before going down, we went up to a small shrine at the very top, peaked over into the long dormant crater, which also held the season’s final vestige of snow, then got ready to go back down. Actually, I wandered off to find the summit stamp for my walking stick, as it hadn’t been readily apparent where to get it at first, then we reconvened.

So we began the climb down. In broad strokes, the trail could be described as rather easy. It was going down at a fairly steep incline, but was made of soft, deep ground, and each step you took would find your foot sunk a few inches into the ground. For my knees, though, this was pretty challenging, after an hour of it, and I started going much slower, as I just couldn’t really take it anymore. There wasn’t really any places to take breaks though, just continue down; in addition, it was starting to get dark out. It seems that the sun is setting earlier here in Japan than back at home in San Diego, I was counting on having light until about 8pm, but the sun was fully gone by 7:30pm at the latest. Neither Dominic nor I had brought lights with us, so this made the remainder of the climb down all the more exciting.

It looked like things were going fine, though. We knew that you had to take a different way down than up; at around the 6th station, people stopped using the same trail to go in different directions, so we were assuming the trail we were on would meet up with the one we were originally on at around 6th station. While going down, we witnessed the lights of the stations bypass us in parallel, but they never got any closer, but rather farther apart. By the time that we were on the same plane as that which we figured was the 6th station, we were farther apart than ever from the lights. It was at about this time that things started feeling odd, if not necessarily to a fault. We didn’t know what the deal was, but we weren’t exactly experts on the way that Mt. Fuji goes, so we just continued on.

Soon enough, we found ourselves at the bottom of the deep sandy part of the trail, and were entering a forest. There was still a clear trail, though. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of people starting to come up the trail for the nighttime climb, presumably to catch the sunrise; these people had flashlights, which, once they shone in our faces, would make all the progress we had managed with acquiring night vision null.

This was really annoying. It takes at least 20 minutes of exposure to darkness to regain a decent sense of night vision, and 20 minutes is a long time when you’re tumbling through a rocky trail in a forest in the middle of the night. And it WAS rocky. Big rocks, with big steps, and it was pretty treacherous. I don’t know how Dominic did it, I was grateful to have my climbing stick to prod around for sudden changes in elevation of the steps.

However he did it, he still had to go slowly, and we were brought down to a crawl, with no sense of how much further we had to go. Sure, we asked some of the people going up how much longer we should expect until the 5th station, but their approximations were pretty shaky at best, and totally incorrect at worst. There were no lights around, and although there were plenty of signs that assured us we were on the same trail, they never once mentioned how much longer we had to go until the end of the trail (whoever is in charge of Japanese parks should really consider adding that to their signage in any of the many trails of the country, it would be a pretty welcome addition).

Nevertheless, an end was in store for us, and at around 9, maybe 9:15, we finally got to the 5th station. Problem: It wasn’t the right 5th station.

Or at least, it didn’t look like the one we left off from. But since we took a different route down than we used to go up, we reasoned that this wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination, and that after a big of walking on nice flat pavement we would eventually find the area that we had launched off from.

The first employee I saw, I asked about where the buses were. His only reply: “No busu!” (busu, pronounced bus-oo, is the Japanese way of saying bus. I heard it a lot in the next hour or so). I knew for a fact that the last bus to leave from the proper station was leaving at 11:10pm, and Japan is not a place to lie about schedules.

So we kept pressing on, figuring that we had no choice but to follow the paved road anyway. Imagine our surprise when the next thing we come across wasn’t anything that we were looking for, but instead a small convoy of Japanese military, who were just hanging out, chillin, doing nothing important. They were laughing, drinking, and popping down into low martial arts poses, just for the fun of it; they didn’t really look like the kind of people that I wanted to take my chances of mis-communicating with, though, so we kept going on, trying to look as non-offensive as possible.

The next thing we saw was a small bungalow on our left; their was a pair of white people sitting on the porch of it, so I took my chances and shouted/asked if they could speak English. Turns out they could, a little. It also turns out they made the same mistake as us; the fact is, we took the wrong trail down. Although you DO have to take a different trail down than up, they should be named the same, just with one indicating downward movement and another noting upwards. We didn’t do that, but instead took a trail that was called something like Sudoyashi 5th station trail. Apparently, that doesn’t lead to Kawaguchi-ko 5th station, but to Sudoyashi 5th station, which I didn’t even know existed.

I didn’t know this until the next day, when I was back at my base camp and able to use the internet, but apparently there’s about 5 trails going up Mt. Fuji, each has its own series of stations, with the 5th station on each being where most people begin their journeys. Taking a different trail down rather than up can displace you easily at least 10km from where you intended on being when you come down, and that’s exactly what happened to us.

Anyway, none of us knew these things at the time. So, that couple, who are Russians, Dominic, and a drunken stuttering Japanese man that was working at that bungalow (“working”) tried to figure out where we were, and where we wanted to go. The Russian couple had a Japanese map that was quite detailed of the area, but, written in Japanese. I used my limited Japanese skills to try to understand where we were; if I was right, then it appeared it was about an hour’s walk from where we were to get to where we wanted to be by paved road. I tried to get the drunken stuttering Japanese man to back me up on this, but all he did was lean over, belch loudly in Dominic’s face while examining the map, and say “n-n-n-n-n-n-o b-b-busu”. Over and over. I’m like, yeah, thanks man, no busu. That helps a lot in telling me where I was.

Thing was, I wasn’t asking about our present location in English, I was asking in perfectly intelligible Japanese. He was just a moron.

Anyway, the Russian couple had called for a taxi, and were going to have that taxi take them to a nearby town of Gotemba. Gotemba was in fact nearby, but only in normal terms of determining distances; walking isn’t normal, nor is there anything normal about distance when you don’t have your own form of motorized transportation. It was about 35km from Kawaguchi-ko, or about 23 miles. It also would cost the Russian couple about 100 dollars to have the taxi take them there. That seemed like a lot of money, so I wanted to avoid it for the time being, and so did Dominic, so rather than jumping in with the Russians, we decided to take our chances.

So we walked. Then we walked some more. And when that wasn’t enough, we walked a little more. Dominic had finally found a compass, and at first it appeared we were going in the direction that we wanted to be going, assuming all of our assumptions about locations were correct. Then the road turned, and it had no suggestion of turning back in the near future. So that pretty much sucked. We were just debating the idea of hitchhiking, as cars were in fact still on the road, when the taxi carrying the Russian couple approached us, and they convinced us to get in. We reasoned that, at the very least, if we were going in the right direction, the taxi would be passing the Kawaguchi-ko station on the way, and could drop us off; if our assumptions about our location were inaccurate, it would have been too late to turn around and get to the correct place, and a taxi ride out of the mountain would have probably been our only option anyway.

We still wanted to try to minimize the costs of everything, though, so at first, a roundtable of linguistic madness between the Russian woman’s limited English and Japanese (her Japanese was a bit better than mine; her husband or boyfriend or whatever couldn’t speak anything but Russian), my limited Russian (more limited than her English) and Japanese, and the taxi driver’s inability to say anything other than “no busu! Takushi! (takushi is the japanification of Taxi)” in quasi-English, was used to try and determine whether or not Dominic and I could make it to the appropriate station.

All the while, the taxi driver hardly looked at the road at all while talking to us. That was a nice little touch to the proceedings. I could have done without that bit.

Eventually, Dominic and I give up on the idea of getting to Kawaguchi-ko 5th station. At this point, we figure the only real options to choose from are either staying in Gotemba, like the Russian couple, then getting up in the morning to go to Kawaguchi-ko in time to check out, or get the taxi to take us straight to Kawaguchi-ko after dropping off the couple in Gotemba. We settled on the latter, especially after hearing the price per room of the hotel that the couple were getting stuck with, which was about 100 dollars a night. Figured that the cost of the hotel in Gotemba plus transportation back to Kawaguchi-ko the next morning would be higher than having the taxi take us straight there that night, where we already had reservations, and that’s exactly what we did.

We wished the Russian couple the best as they departed; they were in rather dire straits, as they had left their passports in a safe box at their hotel in Tokyo, as they had believed they could bus out to Fuji, climb it, and bus back all in one day; being without passports is bad enough anyway, but when trying to book hotels in foreign countries, its even more troubling.

After that, we had our taxi ride back to Kawaguchi-ko. Actually, Dominic was going to Fuji-Yoshida, a town only a few kilometres from Kawaguchi-ko, so I had the last few kilometres to enjoy solo with the taxi driver. The end cost of the taxi ride was 13,000 yen, or 130 dollars, for Dominic and my portion of the ride, which we split between us at 6,500. 65 dollars was worth getting back safe and sound to our proper locations.

I had intended on resting in an onsen and getting a meal at a curry place nearby that had a good reputation after the climb, but by the time we got back, which was about 11pm, that wasn’t really an option, as both had closed. Believe it or not, I wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep immediately, so I stayed up for a little while, trying to figure out the answers to what had gone wrong, then taking an extremely long shower, and finally calling it a night. It had definitely been more than one day’s worth of adventure, which would prove to be a nice balance for the next day.