I climbed Mount Fuji last week, and it was one of the most difficult thing I致e ever done, physically and mentally. We left about 8:30pm on Sunday night, taking a train and a taxi to get to the fifth station - it痴 a ways up the mountain, where people usually start climbing from. We started climbing at 10pm. After about 15 minutes, I was tired, but we didn稚 reach the summit until just after 4am.
 It痴 all volcanic pumice, very loose and very light, so it痴 easy to take one step and slip back three. Also, it痴 very, very steep, and there are some big boulders in the way that you have to clamber over. And it痴 dark, and it gets very cold very quickly - it痴 below 0ｰC at the top, and it hovers around freezing for a good portion of the climb (the summit is at about 3900m, and we started climbing at 2400m). The guidebooks say it takes between four and six and a half hours to reach the top; it took us just over six, with a bunch of rest stops. It was incredibly tiring. I can稚 even describe how exhausting it was...imagine being just dead tired after half an hour, and knowing that you have several more hours to go. It only took us two hours to descend, but by that time I was so tired I couldn稚 run. I have never been so completely drained of energy. All I could do was move my legs in accordance with gravity.
 And then there was the altitude sickness. When I first heard of that, I dismissed it - no bloody way I壇 ever get altitude sickness. But of the four of us who climbed together, myself and another guy, Jeremy, both got some pretty crazy altitude sickness going on. When you ascend a mountain relatively quickly, your body doesn稚 have a chance to adjust to the decreasing levels of oxygen in the air. Hence your brain gets oxygen deprived and can lead itself to some pretty groovy effects. At about the 2800m mark, I noticed that all the rocks in my peripheral vision were getting zebra stripes, and whenever I壇 blink, I壇 see stripes instead of just blackness. My field of vision started getting smaller, and I got really dizzy. After a few hundred meters, I was getting purple zebra stripes, and not just in my peripheral vision. Jeremy got the same thing - dizziness, vertigo, distorted vision...it痴 a pretty groovy trip in all. Our conversations were like this:

Jeremy: Hey, Cam, how痴 it going?
Cam: Not so good...got some purple zebra stripes going on...you?
Jeremy: My rocks are turning green.
Cam: Okay, time to rest.

 Then we壇 curl up off the path a bit and try to keep ourselves warm while we nodded off a bit and tried to get the rocks back to their natural colour.
 Anyway, we made it to the top around 4:15am, and got to watch the sunrise at 4:30am. Just beautiful - indescribable, with the sun coming up over a big carpet of clouds and lighting up the whole sky. Incredible.