Survived!

Yep, we made it up Mount Fuji, only from station 5, about halfway, that it was still quite a climb, starting at about 2300, and going up to 3776. First of all, Dan and me (Photos will follow soon) took the bus directly to the 5th station, which was already full of foreigners, and half of them in shorts and t-shirts, which we had been told by a couple of our housemates is kind of suicidal, as the temperature drops to about 0 degrees every night, and quite often you spend quite a while in the middle of the clouds, which, surprisingly enough, are not particularly dry. However, we were well prepared and John and Ruary let me borrow some of their things. The flashlight and the snowboarding jacket were quite essential. Stephen and his brothers had failed to reach to top a few weeks ago because they were wearing shorts, t-shirts and rainjackets, which meant that they had to turn around just before getting to the top, cos they were freezing to death, and that was during the day...
We started the climb at about 22:30, and after going a bit too fast, and even after slowing our tempo down a bit, we were still way too early to reach the summit in time for the sunrise. So we waited at each of the stations on the way, talked to some of the other gaijin we met. The higher we got, the more crowded it was getting.
The Japanese seem to love queueing, maybe even more than the English. It ended up being a "take few steps, wait a few seconds" kind of ascent for the last few hours! Luckily it was a weekday, I wouldn't wanna queue up that mountain on the weekend.
Then Dan started to get a headache, and didn't look too good anymore, and when we reached the top (beautiful sunrise, a few hundred meters above the clouds, lots and lots of people still coming up, at least a few thousand, and all kinds of souvenirs, food stalls and even beer, which wasn't more expensive than beer in Tokyo) after having a bowl of ramen/ udon, Dan had to lie down for a bit. That gave me the time to round the crater, try and make a phonecall, which didn't work, but only because I didn't have any credit, really good reception up there, and take a few more pix (soon) with my great disposable camera.
Then I woke Dan up, but his altitude sickness was just getting worse and worse, so we slowly started our descent, Dan starting to feel nauseous, while we were crawling down the mountain. A few hundred meters and some painkillers later things started to look a bit brighter. In the end, Dan was almost jogging down, while I was trying to keep up, so that we could still get tickets on the first bus. Which didn't quite work out. The first 2 busses were already sold out, so we had to wait for more than 3 hours, during which we slept a bit on the stairs next to the bus stop. Und wennse sich nich gestorben sind, dann wartense noch heute....something like that anyway