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I climbed her! Miss Fuji! It wasn't very easy but after a night of climbing I was on top.
The traditional japanese way to climb her is to start in the late afternoon, get some hours rest, and reach the summit just before sunrise, so ofcourse I had to do it the same way. I started at 5 pm from the 5th level (2400m altitude) and around 6 pm clouds came setting in with a nice blistering rain in my face.
Around 7 pm I passed the 7th level mountain hut, trying to figure out if the 8th or 9th level mountain huts were stil open (because it was the last day of the season, in 2 weeks the snow starts falling and climbing without a license is prohibited), the japanese guys at the hut with their japanese advice gave me the impression it was okay so I went on. After 5 minutes an older japanese man came down, and asked me if I was going up (in japanese), I tried to ask if it was save enough to walk for an hour to the next hut, and he started making rain and wind sounds and looked very serious so I figured out it was better to return to the 7th level and continue later in the night.
There I was, between japanese people, talking in japanese to me, in the mountain hut. They started making sleeping signs with their hands to me so I figured out it was time to lay all the little matrasses out on the floor. I took my own matrass, 80 cm wide, and thought I was going to have a nice sleep, untill another japanese guy came lying on my matrass, so with 40 cm left and a loudly snorring japanese next to me I tried to sleep for 3 hours...
At 1 am everybody woke up to start climbing again, the sky was clear now, but it was f*****ng cold, 6 degrees, and at 3.30 I finally reached the top, at 3770 meters the highest point in Japan. (2.5 hours seems short but it felt like ages..) Then the waiting in the cold started and the sky started turning orange. Sunrise was around 5 and luckily it started getting warmer very fast. You could see every color in the sky, from purple to red to blue. I walked around the crater, took 1000 pictures and started descending.
The descending was harder than ascending, espacially for your knees, every step at the end felt like a hammer hitting my knees.. but at 9.30 I was back at the 5th station again! and ready to sleep for a long time, which is what I'm going to do right now, good night!
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