A Special Kind of Fool

 

Mt. Fuji in Japan





I was a college exchange student living in Japan with a friend. After studying the language for six months, I could translate Japanese a little.  I saw an advertisement of people climbing a mountain in shorts and the words I translated were Mt. Fuji, walking, and this spring. I thought it would be a good idea to climb Mt. Fuji and my friend agreed to go with me. We brought sleeping bags and wore raincoats, jeans, and sneakers. We were planning on hitchhiking to the nearby town of Gotemba, making it to the mountain at midnight, and reaching the top by sunrise. We successfully hitchhiked to Gotemba and took a rest in a noodle shop. The shop owner warned us that Mt. Fuji was very cold this time of year and far away. The map said Mt. Fuji was nearby so we ignored him and began to walk there. A car then pulled up beside us with the noodle shop owner in the drivers seat. He picked us up and brought us to Mt. Fuji which was in the other direction. After twenty minutes, we were at the mountain and began our journey. After walking for a while, we realized it was too cold and too dark to climb anymore so we rested in two abandoned shacks. The next morning, we both decided we were unprepared and too cold to finish climbing the mountain. We had climbed one quarter of the mountain, turned around, and went back down.

Map of Mt. Fuji