There’s a Japanese proverb, which goes as follows: “He is a fool who never climbs Mt. Fuji, but he is twice the fool for climbing it two times”. Should I’ve headed this warning after climbing the biggest mountain of Japan at the beginning of September already when Ruth told me that she wanted to go up there too? Maybe, but somethimes you just have to be a big fool to make great experiences, and so I agreed to climb the symbol of Japan again in late September. 

Beeing even more out of season than the last time, we had to be very careful with weather conditions to avoid potential problems (like hitting a typhoon, for example ). Unfortunately for us, it was quite a rainy time and our options on when to climb the mountain were slowly diminishing before the planned continuation of our trip to Tokyo. Finally on our last day in Mishima the weather cleared up and we chose to do the trip at daytime to be able to do it at all. With everything we might need in our bags we set out in the morning to catch the first bus to the 5th station and our trip began.

It was a beautiful and warm late summer day, even considering the height we beeing at, but we soon noticed a different problem: time. Climbing out of season meant that only few buses were doing the tour up and down to and from the 5th station, so our time frame was shorter than would have been good for us. Upwards was still ok, but we really had to hurry quite a bit on the way down to catch the last bus, including running in the end, although we took the very first and last available buses for the maximum amount of time. So you can imagine us two beeing totally exhausted in the end: smelly, sweaty, in need of a good relaxing bath. This might be the fulfillment of the saying…

…but damn if this wasn’t worth it!