I finally got to Mt Fuji. I'll tell you from the start that I didn't make it to the top. I was too cold and too tired - most of my winter clothes are still in Canada! And, as I'd given up one of my days off to earn some overtime money, I had a lot of errands to do that day instead.

Perhaps the trickiest part of the whole trip was finding my travelling companions in Shinjuku station. It's absolutely enormous and a complete nightmare to find your way around. There are many department stores above, to match the train lines they own down below. (Japan's railways were privatized several years ago.) It covers several kilometres. And the signs are just not fair.

The friends I was going with live on the Seibu Shinjuku line, which has its own separate station. So they told me to meet at the East Entrance. Convenient for them! Not so much for me...I took the Toei No. 12 line from Nerima, a subway that arrives at the complete opposite end of the station. I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that the bus station we would need was probably close by me as I wandered in vain looking for the East Entrance. Signs pointed in the direction of the South and West Entrances, but that didn't help much.

I found myself in a big half-underground courtyard and rang one of my friends from a payphone. (This was one of the incidents that prompted me to get a mobile phone. The other was trying to meet another friend to help me BUY a mobile phone in Shinjuku a week later!) She said they were standing outside Nova but I couldn't see anything, being under the road as it turned out.

I kept having to go back and ring her, but finally got outside and upstairs and saw where they were. The next trick was getting across the road, a giant roundabout with a bus depot in the middle. But I survived that trip, and we finally found the bus - sure enough, back at the end of the station I'd arrived at! - and were on our way.

The trip took just over 2 hours, and we arrived at the 5th station base at about 10pm, still in shorts and tank-tops from the Tokyo heat! So we changed in the toilets, piling on a few layers, and adding more later as we climbed. Then we set off.

There were lots of other people climbing, both Japanese and Westerners. It started out gradually but got steep very quickly. The air was already getting thin. Mt Fuji is not a technical mountain-climbing journey, nor is it a nice hike through the woods. It's a bare and rocky volcano, with a trail that is easy to follow but steep and slippery with pebbles and ground dust from the pumice. Hard work!

It was a beautiful night, however. It was perfectly clear and the sky was full of stars. The lights of the town far below twinkled in the air, like Adelaide or (I'm told) San Francisco. I thought of some friends who'd climbed the week before in pouring rain...and I felt lucky.

There are many stations and huts along the way. Some (smart) people climb up to one of them during the day, sleep, and then continue up at night. The whole point of climbing at night, by the way, is to watch the sunrise from the summit. There is a very practical reason for this - apparently Mt Fuji is surrounded by clouds most of the time and early morning is the time when the sky is most likely to be clear.

I might have been in Japan too long already - I almost wrote "crowds" instead of "clouds" there! But that leads me to the subject of how many people were on the mountain that night. July and August are the "season" for climbing Mt Fuji, and so this is when the transportation is most convenient and the stations are open. A little outside of these months, the weather could still be suitable, but getting there could be a problem.

Anyway, we climbed and climbed, and gradually our group spread out. I found myself losing energy trying to keep warm as the temperature dropped. I could see my breath! Another woman in our group would never have made it to the top, but for the nice Japanese guy she met who swapped packs with her, carrying her oversized, overloaded one and letting her carry his little day pack.

Finally, at about 330am, I stopped at the 8 1/2 station. (I don't know why it's 1/2.) It was 3450m and the summit is 3776m, but the staff there told me it would take another 90minutes to reach it. I had the most delicious bowl of ramen soup ever made, and I'm sure it wasn't just the cold and exhaustion that made me think that! I tried to go on but, as it was very windy too, I gave up. I couldn't stop yawning and shivering.

At 4am the clouds on the horizon started to turn red. I watched a beautiful sunrise from the station and Êfinally started to get warm when the sun came inside. I wanted to sleep but wasn't allowed to lie down. Guess they want people to pay for beds! However sleeping in a sitting position, as on a Tokyo train, is perfectly acceptable.

I rang my friends on the summit from the 8 1/2 station's phone and then set off down the mountain. The morning sun was hot and powerful up there. I began to forget the previous night's resolution never to turn my a/c up so high again! I finally found some of my group, but we split up again and most of us arrived back at the 5th station one by one. It was hard to stick together because many tour groups were coming down and it was just a solid line of people coming down the mountain. From far away, maybe it would have looked like a giant snake!

The clouds were coming up to meet us, and for the second half of the 3 hours it took me to descend, I was cool and comfortable instead of hot and sunburned. At the bottom we bought some postcards and souvenirs. We met some Japanese guys - one had climbed and his friend had come to meet him. They asked whose (dumb) idea it had been to climb it all in one night! All of us went to a restaurant for some brunch, and I was not the only one who fell asleep with my head on the table. And again on the bus.

Back in Tokyo, the layers came off again as we returned to 35-degree weather. And when I got home, I was quite happy to crank up my a/c again. Maybe next year I'll try again

Copyright Ailsa Wylie 1999