jamiehas @ wordpress

It’s easy. You start just after sunset. Climb up through the night, watch the sunrise from the top. Then climb down in the morning. Kids do it. Grandmothers do it. You aren’t athletic, sure, but you aren’t so out of shape. It’s no big deal.

So twelve hours into our trip to Fuji, and we’re starting to think about the climb. We’ve been riding trains and since seven in the morning – the bullet train could have got us there in a few hours, but it’s way out of our budget, so we zigzag through the countryside, changing every hour or so, small town after small town, slow line after slow line. By five we’re in the bus headed to the mountain that will drop us halfway up the side, where the climb begins.

Apprehensive – there’s a massive black cloud covering the whole mountain, and the raingear we packed is almost worthless, dollar store plastic suits. Are we screwed from the start? Headed for a wet trek with no views at all?

Half an hour later we’re happily kicking ourselves – a language major and a philosophy major, we never worked it out, never thought about the altitudes involved, never saw it coming when the bus burst out through the top of the cloud cover, and we’re laughing and pointing and overcome by this sight, big fluffly white clouds lapping at the roadside like waves, bizarre, a boeing-window view that should never be this close to us. One of Those Great Moments. We get off the bus and just stand around staring, even weirder now, a skyscape just the other side of the guardrail. We tool around with our cameras, taking pictures of the sunset for way too long. There’s all the time in the world to make the climb.

Almost too much time. We begin the ascent at eight, a couple of hours before the crowds. The first few stages are otherworldy, the moon on the other side of the mountain, almost total darkness aside from the cities uplighting the clouds beneath us. At midnight we’ve climbed three fifths of the way, and take a couple of hours out so we’re not left freezing on our asses at the top, waiting for dawn. An hour later this has proved be be a terrible idea, we’re freezing anyway, can’t sleep, each climber shining thier head-torch in our faces, and we give it up and drag ourselves on. By the ninth station we’ve gotten our stride back, gladly knocking back vending machine coffee at five times the regular price, nagging people for snapshots, me fourteen years old again, taking off my waterproof coat for the picture, too uncool.

The last leg is much longer than we’ve been led to believe, and there’s already crimson in the sky. Chris is fading, stopping for breath every few minutes, which scares the piss out of me, he always dances up these mountains, me dragging behind. Out of frustration I dash up ahead, not wanting to miss the dawn. I get to the top and feel terrible, suddenly horribly guilty, what if he’s passed out somewhere, tumbled off a ledge? But ten minutes later he’s up and we’ve made it befroe sunrise and everything is good. We watch the sun come up, take pictures, take pictures of evereyone taking pictures, bitch about paying five bucks for a thimble full of instant tea, and being made to carry the cups down the mountain, secretly desperately grateful for the warmth in our hands.

The journey back down is something else, hell on earth, a desert of black gravel down the back side of the mountains, impossible to walk rather than slide, black dust in our mouths the sun burning us through the thin atmosphere. The train ride home eight hours of dozing and confusion. But we’ve achieved something, definitely; it’s just taking a while for it to sink in. It comes a couple days later, crashed out a a friend’s house, Chris berating Rich for some wind up or other. “Dude, you can’t talk to me like that any more; I’m not the same man I was a few days ago. I climbed Fuji, man!” Of course, he’s just being a dick. But some small change, some small something, some small pride, is there, different, tangible.

The Sakasegawa Matsuri – which we discovered purely by chance – seemed for a long time to be an entirely pure form of Japanese festival. In the normal run of things, festivals here have one important event or purpose at their core – glittering shrines being smashed into each other, men running around in tiny sumo nappies, hapless volunteers in demon costumes being pelted with beans. These happenings are inevitably surrounded by streets upon on streets of stalls selling greasy fried things, jaw-dissolving sugary snackage, or chances to delight your parents by winning a bug-eyed goldfish with a lifespan which can be measured in hours, or a stripy balloon tied to a rubber band. Sakasegawa seemed keen to dispense with the stressful nonsense of events, apparently consisting of nothing but streets of stalls ready to help you get fat, broke and loaded up with tat as quickly as possible.

So we wandered up and down the streets, munching octopus balls, and knocking back cups of shaved ice so sugared up with condensed milk and fruit syrup that I swear I could hear colours for ten good minutes after I finished mine. Eventually, of course, we did find something going on. On a small performance stage, the least excited taiko band in the world tapped away lazily to old pop songs, and Anna – as the blondest and freshest of us all – was dragged out to dance with the old ladies. The evening was balmy, and I basked in the bizarre familiarity of it all, and tried not to believe how distant and alien it might soon seem.