I climbed Mt. Fuji . . . in a bus.

Or so I’m told. The fog was so think that I couldn’t see the mountain at all, so the tour guide really could have taken us anywhere and we wouldn’t have known any better. I have decided to believe him though, because
(a) He seemed very nice
(b) It was 25 degrees in Tokyo, and we went somewhere high enough to have several feet of snow.

Here's the plywood proof.

The bus took us up to Mt. Fuji’s 5th station, which is as high up the mountain as you can go in a vehicle. To go any further involves hiking, which can only be done in July and August because the snow briefly melts and the expedition gets a lot less dangerous. We went up, took pictures of the shrine, shops, snow and fog, then piled back in the bus and came down again. After lunch and several hours of crap-weather and Golden Week induced traffic jams, we made it to Lake Ashi, one of Fuji’s five lakes, for our scenic boat cruise.

The view of Lake Ashi from the pier.


The view of Mt. Fuji from the boat on Lake Ashi.
C’mon. Use your imagination.

For some reason, the scenic cable car ride was cancelled (thank god), so they took us to an aquarium instead. That was nice. I do enjoy penguins.

I’ll admit it, I was pretty disappointed and annoyed. Possibly even more so when I got up the next morning in the brilliant sunshine. This did at least make for good picture taking conditions when I spotted Mt. Fuji from the bloody train on the way home.

It was actually becoming a running joke that I’ve been to Tokyo so many times and never once seen Fuji from the Shinkansen. If it was ever going to appear, this was definitely the right moment to do so. That, (plus the blocks of cheese that I dragged a freezer bag all the way to Tokyo to procure) definitely made the hellishly expensive one-day-trip and 17 hours of train travel worthwhile.