Eagle!!!

Yeah... Sorry for the big break in between my posts. It was Oban week, and I was away for the whole time. Then when I returned I had other things on my mind and things I needed to do, so I just kept putting the blog aside, until today when I realized it's been nearly three weeks since I updated it.

Oops... My bad.

So in that time quite alot has gone on in my life, the biggest been I climbed Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest mountain.




It was an insane experience that I loved and will always remember but there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that I'm going to ever do it again. I climbed Fuji with my mate Brendan, and his friend Michie.

The fifth station which we started our accent was jammed packed with people from all walks of life. I was actually amazed at how many people were there to climb Fuji. It ranged from young kids to people who I at first confused to be the walking dead. Seriously, these people were like skeletons they were so old. It was incredible. I later read that the number of people who climb Fuji daily is approximately 7000 people, and as you start to climb I really seems like there are that many people.



We began our climb from a small hut not far from the fifth station. We had a short sleep and some food before we started in the dark. Headlights strapped to our foreheads and beanies atop our heads we began the walk from the hut to the sixth station, which was about 1.5 km from where we began.

It was easy. As we continued walking Brendan and I could see a red Toori Gate up ahead which we took to be the top of Fuji...

We seriously underestimated the shear size of Fuji. The gate was the seventh or eighth station. We had a long walk in store for us. As the climb progressed the tracks became more like obstacle courses, in which we needed to climb over rocks and actually think about what we were doing. It was a lot of fun, we moved insanely quickly overtaking people we had seen walk past us hours before. We were really enjoying it up until the point that the oxygen began to thin.



I slowly began to go blank. For about three hours or more, I can't remember now, it felt like I would never stop walking. Even when I closed my eyes to stop and rest I could still see the person's shoes in front of me, and thought about how shiny they looked with my torch light reflecting off the back of them. It was a seriously odd experience, more so when people began to vomit every where. It was impossible to walk ten meters with out needing to have a break.

So we kept walking. As we neared the top the sun began to rise over the horizon. People had stopped to take photos. It really pissed me off that they sat right in the middle of the track in every ones way. By this time I couldn't give a shit about the sunrise, as pretty as it was. I wanted one thing. To get to the top of the mountain so I could start heading back down.



It felt good to finally reach the summit. We were able to sit, where ever we could find room. We were absolutely shitted. While Brendan rested I decided to take some photos of what I could as I had intended to take so many more but with out a tripod with me walking during the night didn't present many opportunities.

The view was incredible to say the least. From the summit I could see that too my left a huge lighting storm was terrorizing a city that I may have known, but couldn't recognize. To my right the sky was clear and it was evident that they would be enjoying a beautiful day. It was bizarre to be able to see the two so close together but so far apart.




After some time we decided to track back down Fuji. Compared to going up the mountain going down was like hell. With my inherited 'spaco' feet combined with the gravel that slid from beneath you as you walked I was in absolute pain nearly the entire way. So much so that by time I had nearly reached the bottom I was so pissed off at the mountain that I just wanted it to be over. All I wanted was to sit down so my feet would stop hurting. I was seriously pissed.

So after nearly sixteen hours or more of nearly non-stop walking we reached the bottom. The wooden sticks we had bought, that we were meant to get seared at every station, remained blank and we didn't care. We threw the sticks down behind us and couldn't have cared less that we paid 1200 yen for what was now nothing more then firewood.

We both walked over and bought the most expensive vanilla ice cream we had ever paid for and they were awesome.