Monday afternoon, Shinjuku. Meeting with the colleagues to create the fellowship of dust. 🙂 Bus ride from Shinjuku station directly to Kawaguchiko-Go-Gome. Everyone’s energetic and ready to go hiking.

We were climbing through the night starting at the above mentioned fifth station (2300 meters AMSL) until we reached the edge of the volcano crater at around 3720 meters. This is, however, not the peak of Fujisan for it lies on the other side of the crater at a height of 3776 meters. Anyways, we arrived at the top of our hike around 3:40 am and waited in the blistering cold (around 6° Celcius combined with really strong winds and sandstorms) until the sunrise around 4:45. Harald and me took pictures, of course 😀 Did not see his pictures yet but mine are a little not-focused unfortunately. My fingers were so cold that I had problems working with the shutter button and the AF function… 😉

After sunrise, we started our descent back to Kawaguchiko-Go-Gome. The trail leading down is different from the one leading up. The ascent is quite straight and needs you to climb rocks a lot actually. Due to security (climbing down? no way!) and the sheer amount of people climbing up the mountain during main season (several thousand just for this trail every day) the descent route lies south of the ascent and is nothing but ashes, dust, gravel, sliding down all the time and really killing yor legs….

Around 10 am, we arrived at the fifth station – exhausted to the fullest and barely able to walk any further. Covered with dust and sand, having this nasty black ashes everywhere – and I mean everywhere – we waited for the bus that took us back to Shinjuku at noon. In Shinjuku, we visited one of the very few Burger King restaurants in Tokyo and finally said good-bye to each other.

Phew. Can’t really move my legs without pain at the moment… But here’s a selection of pictures 🙂