MatchaMonkey remembers: Mount Fuji

Almost a year into my stay in Japan, a friend visited me for a couple of weeks. We made all the usual tourist stops: Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. After seeing all that Tokyo had to offer, we consulted our guide books and came up with one last stop: Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji can only be climbed by amateurs in July or August, and we happened to be there at the end of July. This was our chance to climb Japan's highest mountain, and we decided to take it.

We were no fools; oh no, we were going to do this right. So we took one afternoon to sit in a cafe in Shibuya and read about how to do Fuji-san right. It was decided that we would climb at night and arrive at the top in time to see the sunrise, we would we would wear appropriate shoes, and we would have mountain climbing provisions such as oxygen. Once all of this was decided, we headed out to equip ourselves for the climb. We each bought the following items: a can of oxygen, one Snickers bar, and a bottle of water. Incredibly proud of how smart and well-prepared we were being about the whole thing, we headed off to Shinjuku bus station to catch the bus to the mountain.

We arrived at Mount Fuji just after the sun set. I was wearing a pair of boots, jeans, a t-shirt, and a light jacket. We looked at the souvenirs available a base camp. They included, of course, a Mt. Fuji Hello Kitty. We would each buy one the next day after successfully climbing the mountain, we decided.

And so somewhere around 8 or 9 o'clock we headed out. It was cloudy but not raining. As we set out on the path, our conversation went something like this:

"This so awesome! We're climbing Mount Fuji!"

"I know. I bet none of our friends are doing anything nearly this cool right now."

We continued climbing, singing, and excitedly chatting for about the first hour. At some point, it had begun to rain slightly, but this did not phase us. After all, we were fully prepared for anything the mountain could throw at us. We had cans of oxygen. That meant we were prepared.

At this point, we reached the first ranger station on the mountain. A Japanese ranger who happened to be standing outside the little guard hut spotted us and waved us into the hut. We went in and sat down for a cup of tea. There were four Japanese rangers there, and though I couldn't understand them completely, they seemed concerned.

Japanese ranger: "Oijidjif pants wunejros rain."

Me: "Pants good. We fine. Don't worry."

Japanese ranger: "Tonight yspoauew no climb. Top wiydbrtn dpierbvt."

Me: "We want climb. Together ok."

Japanese ranger: Sharply sucks in breath while looking at naive girls with concern.

We left the hut and I turned to my friend.

"We can totally climb this mountain. I hate how Japanese people always baby foreigners, especially girls. I wonder what exactly he was saying, anyway."

And so we continued our upward journey. At first the climbing was fairly easy; there were "stairs" and the rain was light. My jeans were getting pretty wet, but that didn't phase me. We did not, however, see many other people on the mountain. I remember passing a couple of guys, who said "It's nice to see some chicks on the mountain," as they passed us.

As we entered the third hour of our climb, conditions steadily worsened. The wind had picked up drastically; rain was coming at us from all angles; and the stairs had disappeared and been replaced by steeply sloping naked mountain. Keep in mind also that it was dark and approaching the middle of the night at this point. Our morale began to wane; the singing had stopped and been replaced with hopeful utterances that those lights up ahead were the top. But each time we reached a set of lights, we only saw more ahead, higher on the rocky face of the mountain.

At this point, our climb was starting to resemble something out of Into Thin Air. At times, we were climbing nearly vertically on the rock face, slashed by wind and rain. It was dark and hard to see, and I feared that I might slip and fall. Our Snickers bars had long ago been consumed, while the wildly unnecessary oxygen tanks clanked about in our bags.

At around midnight, a drastic decision was made: we would stop at a hut to rest for an hour before continuing. The path up the mountain is dotted with huts where hikers can rest for an hour or two, or stay the night, all for a price. When our trip was in the planning stages, we had sworn that we would not stop at one; now, were dying to reach the next one. Just after passing the sign saying we had reached 3,000 meters, we came to a hut.

Inside it was packed. There was at least one tour group staying there, along with many independent hikers. Our original plan was to stay for an hour, but this changed after my friend began talking to someone from the tour.

"There is a typhoon," she said. "They have closed the top. You cannot go up there tonight. This is my second tour of Mount Fuji; the first time the weather was bad too. I wanted to see shooting stars. A friend told me you could see shooting stars. Maybe next time."

So what we thought was a little rain and wind was actually a typhoon, which went a long way in explaining why the rangers had seemed so concerned about us at the bottom and why there was virtually no one else on the mountain. Given this devastating news, we decided to spend the night in the hut. There was barely enough room for us. Since we hadn't planned on spending the night on the mountain, neither of us had anything to change into. We peeled off our wet, cold jeans and settled in to our futons.

We woke up early the next morning to fog outside. Since we had only slept a few hours, our jeans had not come close to drying. Allow me to tell you, in case you don't already know, that few things compare to putting on a pair of cold, wet jeans in the morning. It was one of the most miserable moments of my life.

We decided to tag along behind one of the tour groups for the trip down. I was surprised to learn that the path down was not the same one we had climbed up the night before. Oh no, the path down was wide and covered with gravel and included no "cliffs." It took us less than two hours to descend and it was an easy walk.

We found ourselves once again at the gift store at base camp, waiting for the bus to come. A very important decision was made; although we had not made it to the top, we decided that the events of the night before merited a Mount Fuji Hello Kitty charm. Hello Kitty in hand, we talked about trying to climb the mountain again the next year. But you know what they say about Mount Fuji: A wise man climbs it once; only a fool climbs it twice. I have not yet been foolish enough to go back.