Today we plan to start the day by climbing as far as we can with the car on Mount Fuji and doing a short hike on the mountain before continuing towards Tokyo where we have to give back the rental car by 10 PM. As we are starting the climb we enter the clouds and it is really foggy.
We stop at a parking area to enjoy the cooler temperatures but it is hard to see anything so we continue the climb hoping that further up we can actually climb above the clouds. The road is very curvy as you would expect as we climb higher and higher from almost sea level to over 2,000 m.
Unfortunately that is not true as even when we get at 2,400m to the road’s end we can barely see anything around us due to the fog.
We wander around a bit to acclimatize ourselves with the altitude and visit the shops and also identify where the hiking trail starts that climbs to the top of the mountain. We intended to do a longer hike but due to the weather we decide to take only a short stroll up on the trail and then continue on towards Tokyo.
The hiking trail is really rocky as we climb for about 1/2h and take in the vegetation, or lack therof, during our short climb. And it is up and only up as you would expect.
There are lots of other people, some of them on short jaunts like us, some of them returning from the peak. It is quite windy but it doesn’t disperse the fog so we return back to the car and start the long descent. We have a backup plan and that is what we are going to use now, Kamakura, another former capital of Japan.
