In the years before the pandemic, the brave or the foolhardy would attempt a climb in the first week of July, the chances of bad weather were high, the descending path would be closed due to the accumulated snow and the shops at the top were not yet open.
By mid July the tourists would swell, crowding the buses, and the square around the 5th station would be swarming with people, occupying all available space, darting in and out of the roads, the traffic wardens in a continuous cacophony on their whistles.
2020 brought everything to a standstill, the government closed access to the trails, asked the mountain huts not to open, and though the determined could still make a climb, you cannot really gate off a mountain, but they would have to take into account the total absence of shelters if the weather turned foul.
The trails opened up in 2021, however the lack of tourists from abroad meant the numbers of climbers would be small. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it if you rode the bus with me from Kawaguchiko station to the Mt Fuji 5th level station. There was a group of around 8 English teachers, mostly American in the bus, there was a British family and then there was us, Indians. Between us we made up half of the bus passengers.
Two of the English teachers sat behind me, with an hours journey ahead of me , I listened in to their conversation. The spoke with the bravado that comes with youth, peppering their conversation with exaggerations and embellishments.
One was 26 ,from Minnesota, from a town of 20,000 people(I forget the name) and the other 25, from Texas.
‘I want to do something for my brother, he’s interested in block-printing and wants to come to study it in Tokyo’, Minnesota said.
‘I am not really close to my brother though, but I still want to do something for him’, he went on.
‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters, my parents sold the house when my grandma died, now I am practically homeless when I go back’Texas said.
Another five minutes into the conversation Texas asked Minnesota’You have a sister right’.
I wanted to tell him ‘Minnesota has a brother, he just told you a whole story about how he wanted to help him’
A few more minutes into the conversation Minnesota asked Texas ’did you say you had a sister’?
It took me all of my willpower not to turn back and tell them, ‘can’t you guys keep up with each other’s conversations? Texas is an only child’, Minnesota has a brother’!!!
There obviously was a subconscious reason why each wanted the other to have a sister, but it was beyond my abilities to understand why.
We planned the climb on a Sunday morning, so by the time the bus reached the 5th level station , there was a large group of weekend climbers, having done the standard Saturday night attempt, waiting to take the bus back to Kawaguchiko.
The weather conditions were perfect, a warm sunny day with a smattering of clouds floating in and out, neither cold nor rainy, certainly helped the climb. The staff at the visitor centre checked our temperatures, handed out forms with checklists of symptoms of possible illness. Responsible travel or at least a climb seemed to be the message that was being handed out.
One of the staff gave me a map of the mountain and started to explain the different levels.
‘I’ve done the climb 8 times , I told her politely, partly to stop the explanation and partly to impress.
She looked up, in surprise, laughed and then said ‘then please take care of your family’.
We paid our voluntary donation of 1000 yen each , towards maintaining the paths and cleaning the mountain once the tourists had left before heading on the way to the path.
The detailed paths of the climb are beyond the scope of this blog, I have done that a few times earlier and this is my 9th climb, so there was a lack of excitement or even freshness about the experience.
There was a First Aid centre at the 6th level and the staff came up to us asked us if we had the health check forms and then told us to keep enough water.
’There was an Indian group in the morning who ran out of water, there are no huts in the descending path between the top and the 7th level and none after the 7th level, please make sure you have enough water with you’, he added.
There were a few climbers ahead, a few returning from a climb passed by, greeting with a cheery exhaustion and there were others, out to experience a part of the climb without having to go all the way to the top.
One family noticeably passed by, first came a young girl, possible 6 or 7 years old, walking , running and skipping down the mountainside as if she was in a park . We looked in alarm at an apparently unaccompanied young child on Mt Fuji. Before the alarm resulted in a reaction, the mother passed by with a toddler in tow, and then a few moments later the father appeared, holding hands with another girl, around 4 or 5 years ,and barefoot.
I did a double take on his feet to confirm that someone was walking down the gravel strewn Mt Fuji path, in bare feet. There are a lot of explanations that defy logic and I suspect if I had asked for one, it would have been as illogical as my expectations.
The mountain huts start appearing at the seventh level and from the seventh to the eighth there is a hut every 15 minutes. I had not reserved a hut, unsure whether we would actually make the climb. Also there was a nagging fear of staying in a hut, in close quarters with other climbers. During my earlier climbs I have stayed in huts where the sleeping spaces are so close, your hands are a few centimeters aways from the next person.
Also the epidemic had set in worries about the capacity of each hut, so I started asking each hut whether they had room for 3 people.
Each one of them said yes, so the worries dissipated and I chose to take a break in the Tomoekan hut（[https://tomoekan.com])at level 7.5. I have stayed at the same hut twice in my earlier climbs, in 2016 and 2018.
The entrance to the hut had a flask of Chai(Indian spiced tea) , for sale ,and looking at me the lady at the counter asked me ’Are you Indian, we have Indian tea’.
I replied that indeed I was Indian and was interested in more than tea, I wanted to a stay. A standard stay at a hut involves a stay, dinner and a packed breakfast for the next morning.
During my past stays the dinner has been curry and rice with a hamburger patty, fish and rice for breakfast.
‘We’ll not do dinner, we are vegetarians’ I told her.
‘I can make a vegetarian dinner for you’ she said.
And to my surprise she made a dinner of curry made up of tomato sauce, lotus roots and potatoes. The breakfast was bread, jam and butter. The fact that she made the extra effort to cook a vegetarian dinner, at a short notice, was impressive.
After a short rest, I decided to step out and try out the chai. There was another group of climbers taking a break outside and a few of them were drinking the chai.
The lady at the counter pointed me out to the crowd, ‘Look an Indian is drinking our chai and thinks it is delicious’
I hadn’t yet tasted the chai, so took a sip and said ‘Indeed it is delicious’. The leader of the group asked if it was fine to take a picture with me, a brotherhood of chai drinkers.
‘And he’s a regular to our hut too’ the lady continued. I was turning into a living advertisement for the hut.
In normal times the hut would have been crowded, the staff overworked and harried and there wouldn’t be enough time for an interaction. In the pandemic era, the climbers were few, I counted only two of the sleeping portions occupied, so the time for interaction was more.
‘We have fewer staff due to the pandemic, the manager told me later.
‘We’ll all go to sleep at 21:00 so if you depart after that, you can just leave, there’s no checkout’.
So we slept for a few hours, got up at 23:00 and were out of the hut at 23:30. The night was clear, with barely a whiff of chill in the air. The stars shone clearly above and town of Kawaguchiko was visible clearly from the trail, the traffic lights blinking at the late hour and an occasional plane flying above.
We were at level 8.5 when the sunrise came, and we had a clear unobstructed view of the the Sun. When we reached the peak an hour later, the crowds were gone.
The weather was cool, no biting winds or a fog and everything was clearly visible all around. The staff at the shops called out for customers, asking them to but something, anything. Before the pandemic the staff at the shops would be driving out customers, the ones who sought the warmth of the shop interiors but did not buy anything.
We bought coffee and sat inside the socially distanced seats, every alternate seat with signs asking people not to sit. However we were the only customers in the shop.
When two of the girls who worked at the shop came out and did an impromptu dance, it seemed as if the change from the earlier years was clear. They danced, arms stretched to either side, and hopped from one feet to another, in perfect coordination.
The toilets, where one would sometimes queue up to an hour , were empty and clean.
By the time we came out the Sun was still shining above and a layer of clouds floated below the mountain, occasionally obscuring the views of Kawaguchiko town. Standing on top of the mountain looking at the endless horizon , above the clouds it was easy to forget all that was happening below.
A major sporting event was about to start while a pandemic raged all around. The cool breeze of the mountain seemed far detached from the stifling heat at the lower levels, the real, the unreal and the fears all seemed to merge into each other.
The access to the descending path was blocked by one of the tractors, used to ferry materials up to the mountain huts. The tractor driver apologized , asked us to move aside and gingerly drove it up to one of the mountain huts, to load garbage bags, beddings for cleaning amongst other things to be taken down.
The descending path is prepared to test your knees, a steep gravel strewn road, designed to make you slip and stumble. The path is deceivingly long, the greenery at the ground level visible clearly from above, but a long way down on a slow descent under a hot sun.
The trick at the path is not to walk but run in bursts. Many a runner passed us, blowing back a cloud of dust each time their feet sank into the gravel.
When we finally staggered in to the 5th station , the last bus to Kawaguchiko had left. The bus frequency increases after July 21st and till then there are only 2 buses a day to take the climbers back to Kawaguchiko station.
The staff at the tourist centre were helpful enough to provide the phone numbers of the local taxi companies and finally one answered saying a taxi was available. All the while the tourist centre staff helpfully told me what to ask!
Once the taxi was confirmed she thanked me for climbing Mt Fuji and wished me a healthy life. Politeness is a natural part of customer service , but in a year where tourists are fewer and less frequent, the politeness levels have gone up.
The lady who drove our taxi stuck up a conversation, asking me if it was hot at the top, whether the view was clear and general enquiries about where we were from.
I found the questions puzzling, coming from a local.
I answered the questions and repeated my oft repeated boast, I’ve climbed Mt Fuji 9 times now’.
’That’s wonderful’ she replied ‘ I haven’t climbed even once!
