First off, we thank you for bearing with us during the summer family vacation lull. Dee and I took our kids to Japan to see the Tokyo area for a week. I'll be the first to admit that it would take years to see Tokyo, so we just hit a few of the biggest highlights:

• Mount Fuji
• The Shinkansen (i.e. Bullet Train)
• The Shinjuku train station
• The Meiji Shrine
• Osada Steve's rope show at Studio Six

We took a bullet train to Odawara Station (the trains are also known as Shinkansen). We clocked our train at 162 miles per hour (that's 261 kilometers per hour). We had a beautiful hotel in the Hakone/Gora area, a big American-style hotel south of the Mount Fuji area.

Japan is famous for its hi-tech toilet seats, so like typical American tourists we took pictures of the toilet seat:

     

This one had a heated seat and three different "bidet/enema" settings for washing your butt. It did lack one feature that our Tokyo hotel toilets had; the ones in town would run water into the toilet whenver you sat down (my son guessed that that was to avoid the embarassment of having anyone else hear you peeing).

After our 13 hour flight, 2 hour train ride, and 1 hour taxi, we all fell exhausted into bed for our first challenge: Mount Fuji.

   

The oldest traditional trail to Mount Fuji starts at Sengenjinja, a shrine to Shinto goddess Konoha Nasakuya-Hime. After this first station, there are 8 other stations (or "steps"). Known as the Yoshida Guchi trail, there is now a bus terminal halfway up the mountain at the Fifth Station. A toll road leads to this point at 7,600 feet. This station has a small shrine we didn't see, and several large souvenir shops we did.

We decided to climb on a Thursday afternoon to avoid the crowds. Weekends and Obon week in August are supposedly much, much busier.

   

The coolest souvenir from Fuji is a walking stick. You buy these 4 ft 5 inch pine walking sticks at the start of your climb, and as you reach the various huts on the way up, you can buy stamps for ¥200 marking your progress. Each stamp is put on with a branding iron. There is a special ¥300 brand at the summit for reaching the top, and one for seeing the sunrise. We collected 10 brands along the way. There are no huts or brands on the descent.

 

During the climbing season (mid-June to early September), the huts are open and they all sell water and sodas. This can of Coca Cola cost us ¥150, which was a lot cheaper than the sodas in our mini-bar at the hotel.

We started the climb at around 12:20pm, and reached the Fujisan Hotel (really just another hut) about 7pm just after the sun went down. We had a nice simple dinner of curried chicken, rice and sausage with green tea at 7:30pm and went to bed (lights out is 9pm). The hut sleeps about 500 people, but it didn't seem anywhere near capacity this day.

   

We had intended to wake up at 2pm for the climb to the summit, but Mick woke up at 1am and decided to get everyone else moving.

That turned out to be a good decision. By 1am there was a steady stream of hikers passing the station on the way to the top. We tried to get dressed without waking everyone around us, but it was like a chain reaction, each person moving around woke two more. We started climbing about 1:30am. It was supposed to take only 90 minutes to reach the top from Fujisan Hotel, but there were so many people climbing it took twice as long...most of the time was sent waiting for the people in front of us to move.

   

About 4am we heard the tour guides behind us yelling out in Japanese to hurry up and climb because the sun would rise at 4:30am. It was about as helpful as people honking their horns at traffic in New York...we were all pushing as fast as we could, anyway.

   

The climb to the top took 3.5 miles to climb from 7,600 feet to 12,200 feet. Two thirds are relatively smooth trails, and one third is climbing over large rocks. Everyone expects the climb to be hard work. What we hadn't realized is the the descent is more work. The trail down is mostly the road used by the caterpillar tracked vehicles that go up and down betwen the huts.

If youre young, in good shape and not overly heavy, you can sort of jog and slide down the loose pumice that makes up this road. Just like these runners who passed us all morning long.

   

But if you're like Mick...overweight with bad knees, then you have to shuffle down and it takes forever. We'd worn cross-training shoes thinking the light weight would be an advantage on the ascent, but our big toes paid the price of not having real hiking boots on the way down. We both suffered subungual hematomas, and Mick wound up losing one of his big toe nails. That's 9 months waiting for anoher to grow.

Here's the crowd of enthusiastic people getting ready to make their own ascent, with the summit hidden in clouds. We wanted to tell them to worry about the walk down

After the natural setting of Mount Fuji and its surrounding national park, we stayed for three days in Shinjuku, one of the largest and busiest prefectures in Tokyo. This was our base for exploring the city. It turns out that Shinuku Train Station is the busiest train station in the world. From our experience we're ready to agree that it's the biggest, busiest train station we've every scene, larger than New York, Amsterdam or Frankfurt.

Our urban Tokyo experience was too crowded to make sense of here...but we saw women in Kimono's advertising who knows what, Luffy Pirates, and cheap costume stores complete with throngs of teens and tweens wearing kitschy ensembles of eccentric clothes.

   

Our last day in Tokyo, we took a break from the urban chaos to visit the Meiji Shrine in Shibuya. This shrine to the Emperor Meiji and his consort Shoken is built in the midst of a huge woodland park.

   

Mick loves sushi, but even he has his limits when it comes to eating Japanese cuisine, and Dee is much pickier. You know you've been in country too long when McDonald's looks appealing.

This was a family vacation with the teenagers, but we did take Saturday night off for one fetish activity...we went to Ikebukuro to see Osada Steve at Studio Six. We'll have to go back to Tokyo without the kids so we can explore the rope scene in Tokyo.