Mt. Fuji FAIL

Today we set out on a tour to see Mt. Fuji. The morning consisted of five hours sitting in Tokyo traffic jams on a crowded coach two rows behind Tokyo's most ill-behaved toddler and nursing mild hangovers from a Friday night out in Shibuya. However, it was all worth it when we saw the SPECTACULAR VIEW from Mt. Fuji:


Yes, our run of good luck when it comes to weather finally ran out and Mt. Fuji was completely shrouded in clouds when we got there. We couldn't see it as we approached nor see anything from the 5th station, about half way up the mountain. This leaves us in the unusual position of having been to Mt. Fuji but not having actually seen Mt. Fuji. (Okay, technically we saw it from roughly 1.5 meters away but it's difficult to capture the grandeur of the mountain from that distance.) Last vacation our ascent of Illiniza Norte was turned back by bad weather and now Mt. Fuji hides from us... mountains don't seem to like us.

The afternoon picked up as we took a gondola up another volcano where we explored a crater where sulfurous plumes and steam still rise to the surface.


Locals cook eggs over the sulfur vents and sell them to tourists. The eggs, which are turned jet black by this cooking method, supposedly add seven years to your life if you eat one (THIS IS A SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN FACT!!!). However, they only sold them in groups of five and we couldn't agree on who got the extra seven years for the last odd egg so we ended up not buying any.

Tomorrow we head home.