The Most Photographed Mountain on The Earth !
The Most Climbed Mountain on Earth !
Your are wise to climb Fuji once and a fool to climb it twice - A Japanese Proverb
These are the few mostly used words to describe Mount Fuji, or Fuji-San, as Japs call it respectfully.
Beauty lies not just at the destination, but all the way too ! This is what applies for our journey to Mt.Fuji. We visited on 27-Aug-2006.
Sunny weather is sine qua non to get a good view of Fuji. This weekend is the last but one weekend left for us in Japan. So, though the weather forecast is not on our side, we calculated our odds and started off. This time we planned to go in car along with family of Kimura-san from our company. We left Tokyo at 8 am (I did weather forecast 1000 times by then). Expected to be two and half hours journey.
Above photos are taken in Winter season, where its not possible to climb Fuji. July and Augut is official climbing season, where there is no snow. But winter is good to see Fuji as clouds will not be there, particularly for photographers. As you can see its a perfect inverted cone, and a Valcano.
One can go till half of the mountain called 5th stage in car, and then climb over to top. Its a trek worth 8 hours up hill, and we choose to go only upto 5th stage.
As we go on and get into mountain area, weather got worse and it looked like an overcast day. This is how the sky was..
On the way, there was a place formed by rocks completely. And Compass does not work in that area; more over, with hill, rocks and dense forest, it became a famous suideside spot near Tokyo. But we did not come across any souls, unfortunately.
In the same area there were few Caves, below the surface, filled with chilling air. Even in summer, water is frozen into ice in those caves. In olden ages, people used to take ice from these caves in summer for the King. The way is very slippery, thin path, low height. Few pics here
Entrance of the cave and Ice insdie
Ice is there on the both sides of the path in the cave like this !
When I came out, mist formed on my glasses and world looked like this for me
Cutting the story short, we headed for Mt.Fuji 5th station. If weather was good, we would have got the glimpe of Fuji from the way itself. But it was almost raining and we could not see even we approaced Fuji and started climbing upto 5th station by car. When we reached 5th station, it was full of fog and visibility is less than 20 feet. And it started altering quickly. To get an idea, in each 5 mintues period, the parking lot looks like this or that as you can see here.
And Fuji is completely covered in fog.
After waiting for an hour or so, which lasted for ages, we got some clear sky and could see Fuji like this. Again, this view lasted only for a minute and again your one hour clock starts ticking.
So, now I am also one of the very sacred persons, who visited Mt.Fuji.I wish to visit Fuji again in the next weekend if weather permits for a better view; but there is a strong disapproval from home department. So, I spend my next weekend buying chocolates to who ever reads this post.
With this, I finished most of the visiting places in n around Tokyo. Next time wish to come in winter.
Today I reserved my return ticket to India, that will be on 8-Sept, Friday.
Cheers !!!
PS: Can anybody tell me this. In India we measure everything in Centigrade, the city temperature etc. But the body temperature in Fahrenheit. Why ?
