Saturday, September 1, 2012

Mt. Fuji

One of the things on the list to do in Japan is hike Mt. Fuji. Mt. Fuji is really accessible, and kind of an easy hike because most people start at the 5th station about halfway up the mountain, and there is a lot of support along the way. There is generally a ton of people too so you are forced to go pretty slow. I wanted to climb the whole mountain so I started at the 1st station adding on a few kilometers to the total hike. Misato and I left Utsunomiya on Thursday night and stayed in Fujiyoshida city. The next morning I started at about 7:30am thinking it would take a while to get to the 5th station where I was meeting Misato.


The bottom half of the hike is actually much nicer than the hike most people do, its actually more natural and in the woods. The photo below is one of the old huts along the hike before the road up to the 5th station was open. No one hikes from the bottom anymore so there is no need for these huts anymore.


I met Misato at the 5th station, I arrived about 10am,but Misato couldnt get to the mountain until 12, since that was the first bus up, and we started up the mountain from there together after buying our little walking sticks.


The fuji trail from the 5th station is really busy, there are about 300,000 people who hike the mountain in only 2 months, so the trail has been manipulated quite a bit with this big steel/rock/concrete barriers to prevent erosion. I think its a bit strange the sacred mountain of Japan has been manipulated/exploited so much, hence why I thought the bottom half of the hike was better.



There were some beautiful views though of course.



Here are our sticks with a few branded in stamps from the yamagoya on the way up. Each stamp is 200yen so we didnt get all of them and unfortunately didnt get the one from the very top either.




Here you can see all the people at one of the support stations/huts on the way up.

Misato and I stayed at the highest hut, 8.5, the huts are called yamagoya in Japanese. We arrived about 4:30, and had the dinner that they prepared for us and we fell asleep or at least in the bed area by about 6 or 7pm. The yamagoya are kind of expensive, about 8,000 yen ($100) each for as youll see below not much of a "hotel". Although they do provide dinner and breakfast and a place to rest for the night so maybe it was worth it.

Not much room in there, you hang your bags at your feet and literally sleep shoulder to shoulder with strangers.

I thought it was funny that at this altitude people are still smoking. some people even bring little bottles of oxygen to supplement in the high altitude, but i guess when you gotta smoke you gotta smoke.



After getting a little bit of sleep i woke up feeling hung over, even though i didnt drink. I found out later it was due to the altitude and the fact that there are so many people packed into a little room sharing the little oxygen at that altitude and your breathing slows when you are asleep you are not taking in as much air as usual. It was a little strange though because when we arrived at the yamagoya i felt fine and once we started hiking I was ok as well. We left the yamagoya about 3:30am and it took us 2hrs to make it up the last 500m or so to the top because of all the people. Luckily there were a lot of clouds so the sunrise was delayed a bit.


Here are a few more pics from the top, including our breakfast from the yamagoya.



The way down is a big dusty road, the same road they use to get supplies up to the yamagoya.


I hiked all the way down back to the 1st station and then on to the main Fuji shrine and finally back to the Fujiyoshida city train station. I arrived at the station around 12, and was starving. I met a guy who had worked at the yamagoya for the summer, 2 months with only 1 shower allowed per month, but he said it was a great experience and as we walked out together from the 1st station to the train station which is about 13 more kilometers I had a good chance to practice my Japanese. He had quit his job to do this for the summer, made me envious!


We stayed in an odd but very cheap ryokan in kawaguchiko on Saturaday night so we didnt have to go back to Utsunomiya and the next day saw Mt. Fuji peaking out of the clouds behind the station.






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