Wednesday, July 16, 2008

7/17/08 Climbing Mt. Fuji: The Beginning

I spent Saturday and Sunday with the crew climbing up and down Mt. Fuji, the highest point in Japan. A day hiking up a mountain is a pretty long day, so I will put my recollections into a few smaller entries rather than one behemoth that would take forever to complete(and read).

Mt. Fuji has been on all of our To-Do lists for as long as I can remember. The guys have been on a few smaller hiking trips to prepare for the bigger hike that lay ahead. A call to my phone on a Sunday morning is rarely received, and running around in the steamy wilderness rarely seemed like a better idea than sleeping late anyway. I did join one of the hikes, though, which was a really good time.

So Tung(who will officially become a no-good quitter in early August) and I sat down last week and looked at our schedules. As weekend by weekend was destroyed by farewell parties and other nonsense, we realized that there was only one time that would work, and that that time would arrive in 6 days. Not a lot of time to prepare, but tourism isn't for the weak of spirit.

I wasn't worried about the travel arrangements, as those always seem to work out one way or another due to Japan's stellar public transport system. I was a bit concerned about my physical preparedness, though. I knew next to nothing about Mt. Fuji, so I had no idea what to expect. The next day after school I ran up and down an outside staircase until my side hurt, much to the amusement of the students who happened to witness it. Any time I told someone Japanese what we were planning to do they looked at me as if I was a crazy person who was about to die, which didn't really help morale.

The plan evolved into seeing the sunrise on Fuji, which involves climbing through the night to beat daybreak. What a great idea....


A poster advertising the hike.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:52 PM

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    Please check out www.fujiclimb.com

    We are planning to climb Mt Fuji 4 times in 24 hours!!!

    ReplyDelete