Mount Fuji - day 13

This morning we got up early to catch the first bus up to Mount Fuji at 9h40. It brought us to the 5th station at 2300 meters altitude. (In total there are 9 stations; Mount Fuji is 3776 meters high.) From there we started to climb up the mountain... at first it was alright cause it was going slightly downhill, then we took a wrong path which was very steep and tiring! Until the 7th station the path was OK, although it did go up in zigzags, making it very tiring and long. From the 7th station to the 8th one, the path turns into a bunch of vertical rocks that you just need to climb in a zigzag kind of way. It was very very steep and the rocks were rather slippery. We managed to get up to the 8th station, at 3000 meters altitude, within 2 hours. We wanted to go to the top, but we had to catch the last bus back (at 14h50) cause if we missed it, it would take us 5 hours to walk down from the 5th station to the nearest busstop... So we decided to picnic at the 8th station. As soon as we sat down, we felt how cold it actually was up there. We were wearing shorts and polos, but our breath made little "smoke clouds"... so we put on our Bols jackets, but were still very cold! We had goosebumps all over our legs! We even ended up putting our gloves on! Once we finished our picnic, we started going down again. It was actually worse than going up because instead of feeling the effort in your lungs, you can feel the pain in your knees that need to absorb every single step you take from rock to rock, trying not to fall down... We managed to go down pretty fast, accompanied by three other hikers and got to the 5th station just in time to catch the bus! The reason the bus left so early is because the season to climb Mount Fuji is july and august, and therefore in the off-season, there aren't that many busses... it sucks, cause we would have liked to go to the top! The bus brought us back to Kawaguchi station and we walked back to the hostel to take a nice warm shower and just relax for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Weather: sunny down by the lake, but lots of clouds on Mount Fuji...