Blogs from Mt Fuji, Shizuoka, Japan, Asia - page 5

We set off for the Fuji five lakes area from Tokyo, it's called this because there are five large lakes just north of Mt Fuji where good views of the extinct volcano can be had. We stayed one night at K's House and moved to a hotel the following morning because the hostel was fully booked. The next place we were staying had been overbooked so we were moved to another hotel! It worked out in the end and we got our first opportunity to lie in an onsen (a bath of hot spring water). It was relaxing but a bit boring since we are separated by gender and no-one else spoke English! At 5.30am George got his first sighting of Mt Fuji. I sadly missed it having failed to separate from my duvet and by ... read more

For those of you who are still following my blog, I am going to make this last entry short and sweet. Part of the reason for this is exhaustion...but perhaps an even more important reason is that the experience of seeing Mt. Fuji seriously cannot be captured in words. A few weeks ago, I told a Japanese man staying in my Tokyo guest-house that I was planning to visit Mt. Fuji during my last weekend in Japan. I incorrectly assumed that he had visited Mt. Fuji before, both because it was the largest mountain in the country and because it was known all over the world. Much to my surprise, though, he said that he, and many others in Japan, never visit Mt. Fuji out of respect for its awesomeness and religious/spiritual significance. It was a ... read more

Day 3 - Shizuoka We caught the iconic shinkansen (bullet) train from Osaka to Shizuoka today. Travelling at speeds over 300kph, we arrived about 2 hours later and picked up a Mazda rental car. I was a bit nervous about driving in Japan but the driving itself turned out to be easier than I'd imagined as the road rules are quite similar to ours and the traffic wasn't too bad (probably helped that it was lunch time on a Sunday). Anyway, we made our way out along Highway 1 towards Mt Hakone. Unfortunately, we only had Japanese GPS and even though I had maps that I'd downloaded from Google, it was still difficult trying to find our way due to the lack of signs in English. We eventually ended up where we wanted to go which ... read more

The trip was started from Nagoya, center of Japan, on 28/08/2010. We caught JR with "a Seishun Juhachi Kippu" at Kanayama station at noon and arrived at Fuji station in the afternoon on the same day. After walking about 10minute to catch bus at Shin-Fuji station, we relaxed some minutes and then took the bus from the station to Fujinomiya Fifth station (go-gome). It took some hours and we arrived the Fifth station at 20:20pm, 28/08/2010. Climbing Fuji was surely a very,very nice memory. The way up with high slope, fine and coarse gravels. This climber is followed by another. In the night, it was very cold but we did not felt because of energy burning from climbing. Although the atmosphere was covered by many dusts, it was clearly seen the expectancy touching the top of ... read more

This is the second of a three-part series on our Japan adventure. Part 1 is dedicated to highlights of our time in Tokyo and Part 3 describes our two-day trip to Hakone. After our first full day of sightseeing in Tokyo we had a satisfying dinner at a Thai restaurant. Jeff is vegetarian, and unfortunately we had problems communicating this in Japanese restaurants so far on our trip, so we went to a Thai restaurant where I could order vegetarian food in Thai for him. With our bellies full, we went to the bus station next to Shinjuku Station and got onto a bus headed to Mt Fuji's fifth station. There are a total of nine stations on the trails leading up to the summit of Mt Fuji. Most hikers take a bus to the fifth ... read more