We are safely down from Fuji. The climb was a lot harder than we had anticipated. They tell us oh don`t worry, children and the elderly do this all the time, but what they neglected to tell us was that we weren`t taking the trail the children and the elderly take, we were taking the steepest most direct route straight up the mountain face. It was challeging especially with my ankle but we made it up to the 8th station where we had a very unrestful night of sleep on the wooden floor with a bean pillow (I can`t believe I haven`t blogged about bean pillows yet-- they have been the bain (bane?) of my existence for the last 2 weeks.)
The Japanese sleep on these horrible pillows filled with either raw beans or rice husks. Makes for a very hard kriky neck kind of sleep. Bean pillows like the bean bags we used to play with as kids. So bad that Shaun actually bought me a new pillow to carry through the country with me, but we left it at Shin-Fuji and so I am back to sleeping on the bean pillows.
Anyways back to Fuji... We slept on the floor where our blankets were thicker than our mattress pads and so didn`t sleep all that much. We were also feeling the effects of the altitude (3200 meters) and so burning lungs, pounding hearts and queasy stomachs didn`t help the sleep situation. At two a.m. when the group left for the summit against local advice due to weather conditions we decided to stay at the 8th station. It was cloudy and no one saw the sunrise so we didn`t feel too bad.
We have gone through most of Japan now, the tour is done and we are on our own for the next week (fingers crossed!). We are in Tokyo for today and tomorrow and then down to Osaka for 4 days to visit Kobe, Nara, back to Kyoto and Osaka. Today we do laundry and we will find an internet cafe to post all of our pictures!!!
Cheers!
Sirina
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