Fujisan

Last summer, after a nice 3 months in Japan, we ISUers met in Tokyo with the intention of visiting as much of Japan as possible... I will talk more about the plan tomorrow... Today I will talk about a huge achievement got by Havard and me ;-) We climbed mount Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan, during the night so we could see the sunrise from the summit.

The previous night, we had been partying in Roppongi (Tokyo) with Mic and his brother, Paolo and Sousuke and we had only had a nap in a manga cafe (my favourite manga kissa in Shinjuku, it is called Mambo and it is next to Don Quijote... just in case you read this from Japan). We started from the 5th station at around 2000 meters high. I will show all the photos in the rest of stations, to proof we climbed it ;-)




That night, several hundred people or even thousands climbed Fujiyama. That was incredible, kids and old people trying really hard to climb a mountain which is not so easy to climb... There was a moment many people was vomiting and many needed air bottles to breathe... kinda scary... Besides, as we climbed it in Summer, the temperature in Tokyo was around 30 deg and it was below zero in the top of the vulcano. Havard and me were not prepare for that temperature change!! I used all the T-shirts I was carrying for the 1-week adventure to try to survive... There were parts of the mountain, mainly near the top, where several climbing ways merged, in which people had to queue!! Unbelievable!! Only possible in Japan... :) At the end of the night, we started thinking we could not make it to the summit before the sunrise and so did many young japanese... The results was everybody rushing uphill to try to arrive. This was kind of scary coz everybody started pushing everybody and some people started climbing out of the climbing path! Finally we got through and watched the most beautiful sunrise in our lifes, in the country of the rising sun.

The worse part was coming all the way back to station five... not so easy after so many hours without sleeping...

There is a Japanese saying which states that you have to climb Fujisan once in your life. If you dont climb it, you are a fool... but if you climb it twice or more times you are fooler... I completely agree...