So the Fuji hike was quite the bitch. Fun, but tough.
We got to Fuji Subaru Line 5th Station, at 2300 meters altitude, by bus from Kawaguchiko train station (about a 45 minute ride). Started at 1pm, and we hiked at a damn fast pace the whole way, only stopping about once every hour to catch our breath.
By 4.30ish pm, we arrived at our mountain lodge near the peak, Goraikoukan. It's at... 3500m altitude?(I can't really recommend staying there, it was rather pricey for what it was) So essentially we did 95% of the hike in three hours, when the whole ascent is usually a process of 5-7 hours. So yeah, solid fast pace.
Chilled a few hours and had a quick dinner (burger and rice with sweet soy sauce) until sunset at 7pm, then got prepped to sleep by 9pm. "Slept" (read: awake most of the time while zipping in and out of consciousness because of all the noise in the lodge, and being crammed in with 150 hikers...) til 3am, then hiked the last few hundred meters to the 3776m summit.
Super crowded on the last stretch, because everyone is climbing at night to get there for sunrise at 4.30am. And so all these tired old climbers are slow as balls, so we do the "recommended 1 hour ascent" stretch in 30 minutes tops, sprinting past everyone. Set up for photos at the peak, tripod and all, and snapped pics to heart's content.
Then we hiked down a dusty trail (to be fair, Fuji is one humongous dusty hike), and got back down to the bus in 2 hours and a bit. Two day adventure, pretty damn sweet.
But the worst part, I just glossed over. The day before climbing Mount Fuji, we spent an evening at Chureito Pagoda in Fujiyoshida, and I had a particularly painful run-in with some evil mosquitoes. This is what their bites looked like on the hike: NSFW. Extremely painful, because they were causing severe soreness in my calf muscles. Not recommended to hike with such sores!
I've got more pictures at their full size of my travels here:
I'm still working on editing and uploading pics from Fuji, Kyoto, Himeji and more from Tokyo, so I'll be sure to post again later. I also regularly post at /r/JapanPics, so you may see my pics there too :)
