A Vignette on Mt. Fuji ...

Let it be said that "travel" is the greatest thing since public transportation. :)

Okay, seriously, my friend Tamarra reminded me today of the time the three of us took a trip to Japan to see the opening of a new resort near Mt. Fuji. It was billed as "the place with the worlds most breathtaking views" and it indeed was all that, but after staying in our hotel room for eleven hours LOOKING at Mt. Fuji, we decided to go climb a small portion of it ... and when I say small, I do mean small. Fuji is the type of mountain you need a whole TEAM of people with you for the climb. It's massive.

So .... we set out for Fuji and had heard from a man in Tokyo the we were welcomed to stay with his family in Fujinomiya ... a small town just southwest of Fuji! Transportation was a breeze! He even managed to set us up with transportation by "a man hauling rock" to the area. All it required of us was a short bus ride, a two hour stand under an awning, and to keenly watch for a "man hauling rocks". From there, we had a piece of paper written in Japanese that we were to give the "man hauling rocks" and he would deliver us to the home of the sister, or cousin, or whoever he said. We were just happy to have a free place for a couple of nights.

Amazingly, it worked like clockwork. Bus. Stand under awning. Look for the "man hauling rock". He came along almost EXACTLY two hours later. We handed him the paper, he studied it a moment, smiled and rattled off something that sounded like he'd been dubbed in Japanese. He motioned for us to throw our bags in the back of his wagon and get in.

This was actually the START of our adventure!

The rock man was indeed hauling rock ... HUGE boulder type rocks that we were constantly having to jump out of the way of as we were jostled around in the back of his wagon. The wagon was being pulled by two animals that I suspected to be oxen and our driver was a sweet old guy who smoked cigarettes and talked endlessly to either us or the oxen ... because we never understood a word he said.

Three and a half hours later we were deposited at a trail head and the "man who hauled rocks" pointed up the trail and shooed us along. We grabbed our bags and looked around. Okay, this was dire ... we were at the base of the mountain, it was getting dark, and had no idea where or how far it was to wherever it was we were going. To make matters worse, dogs, who obviously didn't understand English, were stalking us. Even when Paula, another one my traveling companions tossed them a Snickers, they only looked at it curiously as if we'd just tossed them a box of nails.

So we began to walk up the trail with the dogs following us ... probably ten of them ... all shapes and sizes. I don't know how long or how far we walked ... walking uphill always messes with your time ... but eventually we came to a hut-like cabin that the trail curved around at the rear. It sort of sat snuggly in a switchback of trails that led up the mountain. At sunset, it was beautiful and the trail seemed warm, inviting and beckoning.

No sooner had we decided that maybe we wouldn't be dying that night, the front door of the cabin opened and a woman came out, followed by four or five kids. We handed her the piece of paper and she scurried us inside and helped us off with our backpacks. We were led into the kitchen and she showed us a place where we could put our things and then began to set the table. I believe it was duck we ate, although I can't be sure, but it was delicious and the kids not only cleared the table the second (and I DO mean the second) we were finished but washed down the kitchen and happily twirled and laughed around us.

Then, as if on que, the woman began to turn off the lights, everyone filtered into two doors on the left and right side of the room, and the three of us were left standing there wondering what we were suppose to do next. Tammara noticed three rolled grass mats standing neatly in the corner with small pillows tied around them and she surmised that those were to be our beds for the night. So, we rolled them out on the kitchen floor (there was no living area) and almost immediately fell asleep.

We woke up the next morning to the happy sound of everyone filing OUT of their rooms and we joined them at the table where we had some kind of egg stuff with wasabi and onion I think. It was really good ... but so spicy it burned our mouths. To wash it down, there three communal cups filled with milk and as you know I don't do milk. So I ate the Japanese pancake instead to cool my mouth and drank strong strong STRONG tea instead.

After breakfast, we helped clear the kitchen, and were then immediately handed our backpacks and marched out the BACK door and our gracious hostess and her kids shooed us up the path for our hike. They all stood outside the back door and waved until we were out of site. It's a picture in my mind I'll never forget.

The dogs, which once again came out NOwhere, began following us, then trailed off on their own on a side trail down the mountain. In any event, we were hiking up Fuji on a beautiful day and couldn't have been happier!

Then it happened.

About an hour into our hike we all experienced an odd rumbling in our bellies. The rumbling turned into a growl and before we knew it, we were looking for bushes. All three of us were experiencing the Japanese version of Montezumas revenge, but this came on like an earthquake and for the next hour, we spent our time ducking behind the tiniest bushes and cleaning ourselves with whatever leaves we could find. It was then we decided we were never going to get anywhere at this pace, so we turned back.

Going down the trail we happened upon a Japanese man on a donkey (I swear I'm not making this stuff up) and using the wildest hand motions we could, we explained our predicament. Tamarra tried to give him the international sign for "toilet paper" ... which to her was making "rolling toilet paper off the roll" signs with both hands rolling. Paula, between cramps, struggled to tell him we had ate something bad by holding her belly, bending over and groaning. And I, being the one who hated milk so, decided it might be a good idea to give him the signal that I had drank milk, by tilting my hand up and down at my mouth and making "milking the cow" motions.

Now this man, who was smarter than all three of us put together, immediately summed up our problem and dug into his bag until he found exactly what he felt we needed. Into our hands he presented a brown bottle filled with a liquid that smelled somewhat like lighter fluid. He smiled and made the "drink it" sign and handed it to us. Tamarra greedily slurped a bit down and passed it to Paula and ultimately to me. He motioned for us to 'drink more', and we obeyed.

It tasted like lighter fluid.

In any sense, we chugged down the bottle with his encouragement, thanked the man profusely and handed him back his empty bottle. He trotted up the trail on his donkey, looking back only once to see us standing there as the curtain of bleariness began to slowly rain down upon us. It hit us so suddenly that my diarrhea was NOW accompanied by a fit of giggles in two seconds flat. Paula stumbled backwards and ultimately fell onto her backpack. Tamarra said it first ... "Oh my gosh ...We're sodden down drunk."

I could hardly stop giggling, being the lightweight drinker that I am (I grew up sneaking sips of my mothers homemade muscadine wine) and as I watched Paula try to stand upright and quickly tumble over, I would burst into a fit of laughter. We were horribly drunk now and in addition, the diarrhea had reached it's peak. Pardon the pun.

We could clearly see the cabin across the five or six switchbacks along the trail, and decided (in our inebriated state of mind) that it would be a grand idea if we just forgot the switchbacks altogether and just took a shortcut through low growing brambles and bushes, straight down to the cabin. So down our trio went. Paula mostly stumbling and getting back up, me pooping every twenty feet and killing over laughing, and Tamarra calling "the dogs" (in what sounded eerily like drunken Japanese) which we could see trotting up through the underbrush to greet us. Despite our situation, we were a happy bunch ... drunk out of our minds and staggering through the brush. We were a sight, I'm sure.

Twenty minutes later we burst through the back door of the cabin laughing. I ran to the bathroom to clean myself up, and Paula looked around for those mats so she could lay down. The woman looked TERRIBLY surprised to see us, and the children stood blankly in the kitchen looking at us as if they'd never seen anything like us before. We offloaded our stuff as the woman curiously watched us, then began preparing our lunch of rice cakes and fish. We were too exhausted and drunk to eat, so we just lay in the floor and softly moaned until we fell asleep.

We awoke to the sounds of many people in the kitchen milling around us. There must have been ten or fifteen people there now and they were taking pictures of us and pointing curiously at our bags. The woman prepared dinner, everyone ate and quietly talked among themselves, occasionally nodding to us and muttering in Japanese something we could not understand. Before dinner was over, another man with a small boy came in and we discovered to our delight (and horror) that the boy spoke English.

He gestured towards our hostess, "She want to know who you are."

Paula, our spokesman, explained we were from America and were here to hike a little on the trails.

He smiled, "She want to know why you are in her house."

It was Tamarra who began blearily putting pieces together .... we were not IN the same house we had spent the night. In fact, after taking a second look, this was not at all our hostess ... although in our state of mind, every single Japanese looked exactly alike. We had stumbled into a strangers house, made ourselves at home, and bless her heart, she was doing the best she could to be hospitable. We apologized profusely and began to leave, but our hostess insisted that we stay ... her father could take us back to the bus stop in the morning.

That night we fought off the giggles as we slept in a sea sickness type hangover. The next morning we walked down the long long LONG pathway until we got to the intersection we'd been dropped off at the night before. There were four roads here ... one going around the mountain, and ours going straight up.

The main road was flatter ... this was where the rock man had put us out the night before.

No sooner had we dropped our packs than we heard the familiar sound of a donkey braying and the rolling of wooden wheels. As if on que, the "man who hauled rocks" pulled up at the drive, motioned for us to get in, and he cheerily carried us back to the bus stop.

We all piled off laughing as the pack of dogs stumbled out of the woods across the road and waited with us at the bus stop.

It must be said that two of those dogs got ON the bus and rode with us for a few stops before they got off. Locals. pshhh ....