Fuji-san Kajimashita

Well now...After class on wednesday I went around Shinjiku looking for tickets for the people I was supposed to go climbing with.. that took up about four hours walking, which made me quite tired before I even got on the train for Fuji. Tickets to take the bus to station five fill up really fast. We ended up heading out about 7:30 something and boarded the train. We went by train to Otsuki, and then on to another train line to the base of Mt. Fuji. Of course, the buses from the train station had stopped at 9:00, strange because a majority of people seem to climb it at night like we did. So we ended up getting two cabs with a group of Canadians, splitting the cab fare 9 ways... Got to the top, and after a short settling of affairs at the sovenior shop at station 5, we headed out, all gung ho and setting a killer pace. Of course none of us realized just how much the air had thinned out, and by the end of the first 30 minutes (seven minutes of real climbing) we took our first serious break, and my friend Bladge (not really sure how to spell his name actually), was already having a hard time. We went on, and eventually bladge had to turn back with Miki. The four of us, Shanna, Tom, Ryan, and myself, kept climbing up the mountain with Tom and Ryan singing ROTC marching songs. After about three hours of non-commental climbing, I began to suck a little too much wind myself, and by the time it was 4:45 I had lost sight of the rest of my group. I'd been up for 24 hours by then, most of which had been spent in motion, and I had about had enough. I trailed off behind the group, and they said that they'd meet me at the top. At about 5 o'clock I saw the sun come up above the cloud layer (much like you would see if you were in an airplane) and I passed out. I woke up an hour later with enough altitude sickness/hypothermia to not really be able to move about on my own, and a passerby, at my request, helped me move down into a mountain lodge that wasn't too far away. I paid the $30 to get into there, and passed out under a mountain of comforters above a japanese heater (which is an amazing invention, a fire underneat your bed that never felt so good..). I woke up two hours later from there, and upon emerging I looked up and saw the final summit, and gave about 3 seconds thought to climbing the rest of the way up, but decided that since I was still suffering from mountain sickness, it might be better to get on down the mountain. I practically skipped the whole way down on the lava gravel, and made it to the bottom in under two hours. It turned out that I had made it down to the base of the mountain considerably ahead of the rest of my group, and I spent three hours sleeping outside in a place where my group could see me if they came down. Bladge was down at the bottom too. They didn:t come, but the three hours sleep outside gave me an amazingly terrible sunburn, which I'm still in the process of dealing (peeling) with. The others of the group it turned out had taken the wrong turn on the way down, and ended up on the other side of the mountain. All in all, an impressive mountain, that is good enough to be seen in pictures, but not really that incredible to hike up. More news to come when it comes, I slept 16 hours the night I got back from Fuji, haven't really done anything since then. Until later,-JudFuji-san kajimashita = Mt. Fuji won.