Advertisement
Published: August 11th 2006
Pre-dawn Aura
Before the sun rises, it glows, rainbowlike, on the horizon as some of the rays get refracted through the atmosphere. A beautiful sight to watch while waiting for the sun.At last, it came time for me to face Fuji. I knew it was one of those things that I wanted to do, and I heard that they even have a path up the mountain, which steeled grandmothers and resolute old Japanese men routinely ascend. How hard could it be?
It was Aydin's last weekend in Japan, and since I wanted to see him once before he headed back, I decided to go to Tokyo. Of course, I didn't plan ahead, ended up missing both the bus and the train up, and so had to wait for the following morning. Which meant I had to take the bullet-train, at around four times the price of overnight bus. Curses. So I was stuck in Kyoto for the night.
I called up a friend and had a nice dinner, afterwards renting "Memoirs of a Geisha," which was a surreal experience: a movie about Japan, all in English, while the person next to me in real life was commenting on it in Japanese. The movie was okay: the thing I liked best about it was the sort of sad way it portrayed the loss of elegant old Japan. [Incidentally, there ought to
Aydin and I
Next to Hachiko, a very famous symbol of Tokyo - google him if you want his cute / sad story. be a word for this feeling: like nostalgia, but the feeling of loss when things come to an end. For Lord of the Rings fans, the feeling you get when the Elves pack up and sail away, realizing their time to leave has come. Anyone know?] You become cognizant of how traditional Japan had to disappear as America arrived. It's the ending of something that was mystical and beautiful in its own way.
Interestingly, in some ways Kyoto and Tokyo show this dichotomy. Kyoto, the old capital, is perceived to be somewhat elitist in Japan. It looks smugly down on the brash neon and technocracy of Tokyo, speaking a fluid dialect derived from the old aristocracy, and holds many of the old values - temples, gardens, beauty, and solitude - paramount over consumer power and commercialism. Not to say that it isn't modern, but it comes closer to being traditional. These themes of local culture vs. globalization have been hacked to death, so I won't go into it here, but I am envious of people a few hundred years ago who could go and see the real e.g. Japan, China, India, etc. before they were sanitized, modernized, and tour-ified
The Group at the Base
All of us, pre-climb. The other cool people are from Aydin's program based in Rice University. to destruction. As, no doubt, people will be of me in as many more years.
Regardless, in the morning at 6:15 A.M., my bullet-train departed: with closed eyes I dragged myself aboard.
The early day was spent touring around Tokyo's shopping districts, guided by Aydin, showing off the interesting parts of Tokyo.
And then:
Mount Fuji.
Dear God. It really was a mountain.
My only previous climbing experience had been Vesuvius, of Pompeii fame, during high school - and it had been a mountain climb in technicality only. A bus drove us to a point five hundred feet from the summit, then, and we walked the rest. Those five hundred feet sure were tough, but ... yeah know, for like twenty minutes.
We spent sixteen continuous hours climbing this beast, beginning at 7:15 p.m. - when night had already fallen. Never did we stop for more than 15 minutes, except at the summit where we rested for one hour before we began the painful descent. Sixteen continuous hours, all through the night, of intense physical activity that nearly destroyed me.
I have a bad habit of trying to wing things. I'm actually
Looking down on cities below
A hard picture to take. This is the distant glow of a Japanese city, seen from a couple of hours away. okay at working out logistics, but I hate doing it: hence, I've recently noticed that even when I don't plan for things they still happen. So I figured I'd wing Mt. Fuji like I do with everything else. At the base of the mountain, I drank the last of the water ("Man, it's a hot day. Mmm. Cold water. Mmmmm."), and ascended with my backpack loaded with: 400 calories of CalorieMate, and 200 calories worth of SoyJoy. And since I didn't have time to drop anything off, everything I brought to Tokyo: all my toiletries, shaver, a change or two of clothes, a book, a dictionary, my music, camera, extra headphones, empty bottles, etc. I was, to say the least, ill-prepared.
We began leaving Tokyo at 2:15, but arrived at 7:15 at night after changing trains, buses, subways, and all manner of transit Japan has to offer, finally reaching base-station five - the beginning of the climb. When Mt. Fuji last erupted in 1707, it blew a big 'ol chunk of itself out the side and made the base very gradual; so, rather than take the two days it takes to get to a point where you actually begin
The slope
It's finally getting light. Check out the ridiculous angle of the slope - this is like 45 degrees. going significantly uphill, most people start at station five. The tradition in Japan is to climb Fuji during the night and then witness dawn from the summit, so we all figured we'd do the same.
I bought a vastly overpriced walking-stick in the kitsch shop (but dude - they burn-in base station brands along the way up. Fire. That's, like, permanent.), scouted out souvenirs, and then gathered the group to head up the mount. We found the entrance, and slowly began our trek uphill.
Describing the ascent is extremely difficult. Boring things always take a long time, as do painful things, as do things for which you just can't wait for the ending-point: this was all to the extreme. If you ever wanted to make time stretch, climb a mountain at night. It is absurd. You can't see a thing, you're always stepping on sharp stones and slipping, and time simply refuses to pass. Every step you take is exactly like the previous and the next. There is no way to gauge your progress. And: you are going to be doing this for at least the next twelve hours.
I'm just going to point out a
Hours and Hours of this.
Right, you can't see anything. Enjoy. This is a pic of the switchback below us that people are winding up. few things that happened, but, to experience the climb, remember above all that this mountain is interminable, lonely, and Not Made For Man. That mountainside at night was purgatory: here, you will be punished for your sins of not exercising enough. Enjoy that near-eternity. Enjoy your thoughts, which begin to loop like the annoying car-trip songs for kids. Enjoy the inability to speak, because you're too winded from the thinning atmosphere. Enjoy sensory deprivation: your body gradually begins to go numb from the cold, you're well beyond the smells of flowers and living things, all you hear is that devil-speak you can't understand and that damnable crunching of the shifting pumice. Not to mention the pure black instead of sight. Oh, and food: all you got is that crap that tastes like chalk.
Some things to break the eternity:
-Around 9-10 at night, Tokyo launched a whole bunch of fireworks. No idea why. It was, however, quite cool to watch fireworks from above, looking down. They were beautiful, if distant and cold.
-Some of the base stations had water, and Snickers. I spent more money than I care to remember purchasing both.
-There were several points
Death rattling
What is this? I glare at the funny flare clogging up my lower left corner, not realizing this is a photo of impending Death. where we had to get on all-fours and scramble up near-vertical paths, or vertically hop-step through quickly-shifting pumice dust. By the end, I decided that my walking stick was perhaps the best overpriced thing I've ever bought.
-Altitude sickness. Not me, but two of our eight were affected. Not pretty, not fun, and I don't know how they had the willpower to keep going.
-Ten P.M., our reservation time for the hotel / floor with a roof came and went. We were making poor time, despite near-continuous proceeding.
And then came the jam. Although it seems incongruous with my lonely description so far, the mountain was packed. Then again, nothing is quite as isolating as being alone in a crowd, and this was precisely that. However, if there was one thing more painful than climbing the mountain, it was simply standing still on the mountain, unable to rest, unable to proceed, just waiting for the person in front of you to move. For hours. Time has no meaning here.
Now, praying for the sweet release of movement: sure, your body aches but you want that warmth, that progress. Those solid limbs are slowing, rooting into position
Holy Crap! That thing is bright!
I take a pic of the distant, tiny fireball, which for some reason lights the entire sky. as the summit lies far, far away.
Midnight came and went; we decided we'd rather not spend the fifty bucks apiece for the scant two or three hours of sleep we'd get. We pressed on.
Those witching hours in the strange time when you pull all-nighters stretched without end. Walking, blind, uphill with the cold becoming painful. We had been sweating at the base in the 80s Fahrenheit, but the temperature apparently drops to around freezing at night. Not that it matters; here, there is nothing to serve witness to that: no water, no flowers, nothing but the long line of awkwardly lumbering bundles trudging up the mountain.
When 4 or 5 (no daylight savings here, so the sun comes up early) finally rolled around, we were maybe 300 meters from the top. Rather than rush to the top that was likely quite crowded, we stepped off the path (little more than a chained area snaking up the vast side) and sat on the slope. And waited. I had no problem with this waiting: the sun was coming, I didn't have to move, and we grouped together for warmth.
It's hard to explain how incredible the
It's the sun. It ought to be large.
I zoom way in, trying to get a better picture. My ears are deaf to the camera's screams of pain. sunrise was. Understand that when I saw it, I realized it had all been worth it. Everything I griped about above, all of it was bearable for what we saw: a view so wide you had to spin your head to get it all, from the tallest point in a Japan surrounded by wide seas, hills huddled amongst the drifting fog far, far below.
It was beautiful.
We spent around an hour relaxing at the top. We all greeted the day in our own way: some with shut eye and hood pulled dark, some by walking victoriously around the peak, some with hurried trip to the bathroom. I decided that no gentleman ought to face the morning sun unshorn like an animal, and, well, I had all my toiletries anyway. I shaved and cleaned up a little. Sometimes I wonder if I am little more than the summation of habits (affectations?).
We decided a point close to us was, in fact, The Highest Point, and proceeded up there for a picture. A cloud sauntered smugly by - a hundred feet below us, which should make a good pic, when I pry it from a friend-once-removed amongst the
Me on the slope
But something's not quite right. Why, precisely, do I have green cheekbones and pink eyebrows? anonymity of the internet.
Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one that found enlightenment on Mt. Fuji. My camera was freed from his electro-mechanical obligations and has now transcended into the realm of Art. In my brilliance, I decided it would be snazzy to grab a picture of the sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji, ignoring three important concepts:
1) It's absurdly dusty.
2) There is very little atmosphere up there. You're well above most clouds. None of that wussy UV-protecting atmosphere crap.
3) I'm taking a camera designed for indoor use, and shooting a picture of the Sun. That giant thing so bright that it manages to deposit 1.3 kilowatts of energy per square meter on the earth, which is a unit of distance so far away that it must be called astronomical.
And thus, somewhat ironically, my Fujifilm died filming Fuji. It annihilated the poor li'l thing. But nay! I will not be disappointed. It has simply become creative in its abilities - never again will I have to suffer through receiving precisely the picture I desired. It will always take the picture I intended to take, and then alter it in an unexpected and
Looking uphill
Also known as "The Martian Surface on Acid." The girl in front of me is wearing jeans and a navy hoodie. I have no idea why she looks like she's in a spacesuit. Not to mention the vibrant, colorful ground. interesting way so that it can make up for the lack of creativity that I exhibit. No more artificial, staid, smiling shots of Danny next to yet another monument. You wanted a picture of the mountain? Too bad! Behold: The Martian Surface on Acid. A celebration summit pic? Oh, dear no. Behold: Modern Minimalist Me! The face is mostly symmetrical - you only need half of it, and purple skin is so much more interesting. The mountain, a classic symbol of Largeness: represent it with the tiny, merest indication of mountain-ness in the corner. Turn expectations and classically established symbology on their heads! Brilliant!
That, and the grinding noise it makes whenever I operate my zoom make my slightly wary of my formerly trustworthy companion.
Going down was hard. I had used up all my energy getting to the top and was hardly ready to climb again, even in a downwards direction. Plus, I was tempted the whole time to simply step off the path, over the low chain, and slide the many kilometers to the bottom. Alas, the larger of the rocks looked too menacing.
The biggest problem was that our legs had turned to spaghetti.
The crater at the top
Or, at least that's what I thought I wanted. My camera chides me: what is a crater but the nothingness where there ought to be a mountain? Hence, the cheeky camera gives me a picture of a lack of mountain. They no longer supported positions between relaxed and locked, so slowly stepping down, holding an angle, while fighting against the shifting stones and dust beneath our soles was near impossible. A couple of us discovered a high-energy method of descent, though, that avoided this problem: we flung ourselves down the mountain. If you leap in the air, double-tapping the ground with your feet only when it is necessary to ascend again, and use the pole to vault around objects, you not only descend quickly but do so without straining the joints or slipping. You can't trip when you're airborne and you don't spend enough time on the ground to be thrown off. So we vaulted down Fuji's switchbacks.
All told, though, it still took us several hours to get down, and we were practically sprinting. The dust was horrible, blinding and choking, but by this time we were ready to leave the mountain. We made ridiculously good time compared to going up, but this was a large mountain, and when we finally reached that exit gate, I was too tired to celebrate.
I bought some drinks and headed towards the buses, where I was forced to stand in
Victory!
The picture at the summit, or modern art. the isle for an hour while the bus went back to civilization. Insult upon injury. I grabbed the bar above my head, did a half-pull up and half-slept hanging from it.
Eventually, victorious and grinning, I emerged in my home train station and proudly strutted through with my walking stick, emblazoned on the top with the fiery words of "Mount Fuji: Highest Point." All told, we spent 25 continuous hours on the mountain, walking for sixteen hours straight through the evening, night, and morning.
Done.
~Danny
Advertisement
Tot: 0.108s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0552s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
kelvin
non-member comment
camera woes
well i guess you'll be needing a new camera already. rather unfortunate. but you can always ebay your camera as the next pomo thing.