Tag 6

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I made a lot of fun about the Fuji-san hike before… Basically it’s just a long stairway with hundreds of people, and now they also have free Wifi, on the mountain.

I have to say, there are a lot of ways to do this differently. You could, I suppose, have an easy hike from early morning all the way up from the fifth station and return before nightfall. This is about 2000 meters up and down, but as I said, it’s basically a long stairway with some Kraxeln, that’s it. When you want to see the sunrise at 5:25am from the summit you could also make a reservation in one of the mountainhuts on the way, spend the night there, and continue to the summit in the hour before sunrise (which is somewhat expensive, but hey!).

The thing is, I did neither, I wanted to safe some money, a lot of people (hundreds, they say) are doing it, and I consider myself more Alpen-experienced than the average Vietnamese tourist or probably also ‘the Japanese’. This was one of the most challenging experiences of my life, I would put it in the same category as getting streetmugged in Ceuta once, and I won’t ever make fun of Mt.Fuji again. So, why is that? It’s only 2000 meters and ample time, right?

It gets cold. It gets so incredibly cold. I put on all of my mountainering-gear and I was not prepared for this cold – at all. They should write on all websites, blogs and guidebooks “whatever you consider the right amount of warm clothes, double it!”. You start your hike from around 2000 meters and, surprise, from close to midnight on there is nothing but an increasing cold with every meter of height and every minute of nighttime. And the wind cursing this “lonely mountain”-volcano is nothing like any wind I ever experienced. There are no hiding places, like anywhere, all the way up.

The thing is, there are a LOT of people hiking Mt.Fuji. More like thousands than hundreds, I’d guess. This means they won’t let anyone in the huts without reservation, except some real emergencies (and there are plenty of them), but you have to be close to dying, for real. They won’t let you in, they can’t, not for a minute, not even shortly. And all there is outside is the cold.

This does two things. First, there is no refuge. There is nothing that makes the cold any better, not even for a minute. Except to keep on climbing, because that makes it somewhat bearable. You cannot sit down for longer than 5 Minutes, it is just that cold. You just can not stop.
On the same time, you can not just “get it done with”. You can not climb up and that’s it. These 2000 meters are signed to take something like 6-8 hours. I suppose I could have done it in under 4,5. The problem is, that you have something like 10 hours to kill, from the arrival of your bus from Shinjuku at 7pm to sunrise at 5:25am. The last thing you want to do is climb too fast, because with every meter of height it gets even colder and colder, and the only thing helping it is to keep climbing. So, to arrive at the summit with two more hours to wait, feels like suicide in your head, because a) it is the coldest point, obviously, and b) you can not even climb from there. Ideally, you’d start your hike at midnight and just get straight up. But there are no busses that late and there are just too many people, many despairing, a lot of them turning around and blocking the way, so you would never make it to the summit till 5:25am.

What makes Fuji-san so hard, what makes it a “Grenzerfahrung”, is that it is not even higher, actually! I really think it would have been much easier to just keep walking a steady pace all the time, if there wasn’t the threat of arriving at the summit way to early. So, what you do is, you try to walk as slowly as possible to still feel somewhat above 0°, with stops as short as 5 minutes, because longer ones you couldn’t stand. And you stall. And you bide your time. And you realize it is only midnight, you have been doing this for 5 hours now, and it will be five hours more, and the next five hours will be even colder, due to height and time. And you couldn’t even quit, even if you wanted, because the bus back to Tokyo is at 10am the next morning.

All in all, it reminded me a lot of Stephan King’s The Long Walk. You just have to keep going, you just can not stop. No step is hard, actually, but sitting is impossible, and from your start at the fifth station until your bus back it’s 17h hours. 2000 meters up and down – in one long run, without rest – would have been ok with me, not easy, but manageable thanks to previous experiences. But I was not prepared for 17hours nonstop through the night. Most of it in pitchblack darkness, so you could only make out your neighbours from really close-by, with flashlights.

It reminded me more and more of a really scary drug trip with every increasing hour. There were phases when you desperatly needed to talk to the people around you and they did as well, you asked all the questions you could think of, how long have you been in Japan, what are you studying, again and again, switching randomly between Japanese, Englisch and even German – just, so that some 30 minutes would pass easier. There were times when people shut off and you just disappeared in silence and solitude for a while. I swear, once I was talking to ‘a friend of mine’ that I met before, in Japanese, for what felt like 10 minutes, until he asked me in English what I wanted from him and I realized I didn’t even know who I thought I was talking to anymore. It was still a stairway, but a really weird psychodelic stairway, decicively not to heaven. During the descent, everyone was swaying like a drunkard, some lying on the side, sleeping on the dusty volcanic ground. I just wanted to pull throug to get to my bus, to somehow finish this, but I was really more sleepwalking and phasing in and out. And the way down, again, took hours and hours and hours.

I suppose you could do this very very differently, with an overnight stay or so. I also suppose you don’t really have to do it at all. Once the daylight is up, you realize it’s a really barren, ugly mountain, all in all – it’s an active volcano! But, yeah. It was the perfect sunrise, I suppose. Like the platonic idea of all sunrises. I have no idea what that means in terms of a closing remark. But I won’t make fun of Mt.Fuji and the staircase again.

And there wasn’t even Wifi anywhere, except at the entrance.
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7 Responses to Tag 6

  1. Kili says:

    Uhu, not bad, Fujikraxler Lukas!
    I suppose that’s why there’s that proverb about wise men not climbing the Fuji twice, or however that goes.
    I’m glad you made it to tell the tale! 🙂

  2. Ulli says:

    Respekt, für dieses Unterfangen und für diesen fesselnden Bericht: fange beim Lesen zu frösteln an ….

  3. Phil says:

    Holy f***ing shit!

  4. Papa says:

    Mir bleibt die Spucke weg ueber dein Abenteuer, aber darauf ein Halleluja! Wunderschönes Foto! Alles Liebe aus dem Rheingau = heute Tag des offenen Denkmals.
    Lieber Gruß Papa

  5. Sara says:

    That is messed up. I shall not make fun of it again either.

  6. Sophia says:

    real life struggles..
    — but guess what: there might be no one beeing enlighted by easy steps…
    Go, have a sun stamp!

  7. Vera says:

    ok, nun sehe ich auch anderes als Hochhäuser!

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