Lake Kawaguchi camping trip, Golden Week 2008

First, let me explain about what “Golden Week” is. Golden Week is a week in Japan, usually the first week of May, where there are three or more consecutive public holidays. Everyone in Japan usually takes the other two days off and travels with their families. It is notoriously difficult to travel or get any enjoyment out of any well-known place in Japan at this time, since the roads will be gridlocked, the trains will be packed and just about everywhere will be crowded. This year, Golden Week was a bit of a joke, since two of the three holidays fell on a Saturday and a Sunday. The government kindly decided to remedy this a bit and add a “substitute holiday”, so that the Monday and Tuesday were both holidays, but the people of Japan were still left with a Golden Week that was pitifully short.

Anyway, a group of friends and I decided to do some camping. If you’re going to choose any time to explore the wilderness, it should be when everywhere else is crowded. Even the wilderness gets crowded in Golden Week, but it’s not so bad when you compare it to the four hour queues at Tokyo Disneyland (no, really). We booked a lodge by a lake near Mount Fuji, and boarded the ridiculously packed train bound for adventure.

This wasn’t the first time that I had been to Mount Fuji or Lake Kawaguchi. I had already been there exactly a year ago, in Golden Week 2007, with Greg, Allen, and Allen’s friend Jeremy. This time I would be going with an (almost) entirely different, and larger, group of people. Altogether, there were eight of us: Allen, Zahra, Adrian, Jami, Christophe, Rico and Karen.

Allen, coming for the second time, is an American with chiselled features and a penchant for economics. His girlfriend, Zahra, is also from America by way of Puerto Rico and Iran, but has less of a penchant for economics. Adrian hails from Australia and can play a bass guitar like the devil himself. Jami is another American, who owns a $1000 handbag and is yet a very intelligent person. Christophe is from both England and France, a strange combination that was presumably the result of an accident similar to the one in the movie ‘The Fly’. Rico is from Jamaica and a top-notch cook, beaten only by my beautiful girlfriend Karen, from Brazil.

Yes, it was an interesting assortment of people from all over the world (but, strangely, no-one from Japan). Contrary to expectations, we all got on pretty well, and barely fought at all. After arriving at Kawaguchi-ko, we went to a supermarket, bought lots of food to cook on a barbecue, and caught the bus to our campsite. We pleasantly spent the evening lighting a fire, cooking food, drinking and generally enjoying ourselves. We did make a misguided attempt to walk in the nearby “suicide forest” but couldn’t find any decent footpaths, so we slunk back to our lodge and spent the rest of the night snoring.

The “suicide forest”, named Aokigahara, is famous in Japan for, well, you can guess. Hundreds of bodies have been found there. Most are people who go there to end it all, but some are people who wander in and get lost in the sea of trees. It really is a huge forest, have a look at the satellite photos if you don’t believe me (it’s the dark, malevolent green patch). What’s worse is that compasses don’t work there due to massive iron deposits underground or something, so if you get lost there, you’re really screwed. It’s also reputed to be haunted, which was the main reason for our visit last year. We didn’t find any ghosts, but did instead encounter a rave. We were happy to accept it as a substitute. So this year we had every intention of going into the forest properly and finding something scarier that a bunch of dancing hippies. Which would certainly take some doing.

We didn’t really have a plan for the next day, so we got up late and rented some rowboats to take out onto lake Saiko (pronounced, pleasingly, like “psycho”). The weather was glorious and we had a very happy time flailing our oars and pretending it was an accident whenever we crashed into each others’ boats. The scenery was wondrous, even the looming presence of the Forest of Death seemed brighter than usual, though it seemed to be trying to pull our boats to a rocky demise at it’s edge. Damn you, Forest of Death, don’t you ever give up?

Once we were back on dry land, we spent a lot of time walking around the lake, looking for a place to eat lunch. The nearest place refused us, because “there were too many” (the place was empty) and “it might take a long time to cook the food”. But it was pretty obvious from the scowl on the owner’s face that foreigners weren’t welcome in her café. Refusing a lot of customers lunch on the busiest day of the year when your restaurant is totally empty doesn’t seem like a good business idea to me. You won’t find me sympathising with the plights of a bigoted restaurant owner, however.

We had to walk for about twenty minutes to the next closest restaurant, by which point it was getting well into the afternoon and Rico was passing out from hunger. The food was good, but the service was ridiculously bad. It took us an hour to get served, another hour for our food to arrive (all at different times, but that seems to be the norm in Japan), and even after two hours not everyone had their food, and we had to cancel their orders to catch the next bus into town. Which we missed.

We tried to wait for the next bus at the camp site, but it never came (Golden Week traffic, I guess), so we caught taxis into town. There we walked around the much bigger lake Kawaguchi and enjoyed spectacular views of Mount Fuji. That evening was spent dining extravagantly on Indian food at a wonderful place called “Ali Ba Ba”. We mocked the rather geographically confused name at first (there’s another Indian restaurant in the same town called “Aladdin”), but the owner was so nice, and the food so delicious, that we felt guilty about it afterwards. The guy was from Nepal, and he genuinely seemed pleased to see us. He talked with us, laughed and joked with us, and served us with courtesy and punctuality. What a contrast to our lunchtime experiences. And the food was wonderful. Fantastic naan, awesome curry. I wish we could have left them a huge tip, but such things are frowned upon in Japan. Needless to say, I will definitely be going back there next time I’m in Kawaguchi-ko.

The next day, we split into two groups. Allen, Rico, Zahra, Karen and I went off to attempt to climb a small portion of Fuji, and Jami, Christophe and Adrian decided to go hiking around the woods near our campsite.

Allen had climbed Fuji with his friend Jeremy the previous year, while Greg and I had done a bit of cycling and bat cave exploring. Allen told us how they climbed up a fair way, and there was a bit of snow, then climbed down for a very long time, and were finally lucky enough to get a lift from some passing tourists. He said that there was some snow on the mountain, but it wasn’t cold at all. In fact, he had been wearing a t-shirt when he climbed up Fuji. So we were expecting it to be fairly warm up there, with a couple of patches of snow either side of a nice gravel walking path.

In fact, as we were taking the bus up the mountain, it slowly dawned on us that there was a lot more snow than we had expected. And it was getting pretty cold. But at least they had cleared the masses of snow away from road road, so there was going to be a pretty safe path up the mountain, right? Right?

When the bus dropped us off, we used the toilet (which we had to pay ¥50 into an unattended box for, but I didn’t because the toilets were so poorly kept, and should have been free anyway) and then prepared to climb the mighty Fuji. Everything Allen had told us was a lie. It was cold, the snow was the deepest I’ve ever seen in my life, and there was no real path through it. We had to trudge through the snow, every so often sinking knee deep or further in it. Well, maybe Allen might not have been to blame, we could have come after an unseasonal blizzard or something, right? No, it was in fact the same last year, but he had “forgotten” about the snowy part of the mountain. Which was to say, all of it. Even the sight of his friends wearing shorts and t-shirts as they prepared to climb the mountain didn’t jog his memory into warning them about the conditions. Not even the fact that his girlfriend doesn’t like the outdoors too much, and like most people is averse to being cold, wet and waist deep in snow. After ten minutes of wading slowly through the snow, both Zahra and Karen decided to go back. And I didn’t blame them.

However, Allen, Rico and I still had a great time. Even though my feet were numb with cold from all the snow getting in my shoes, the feeling of climbing a mountain in the snow seemed so adventurous that just doing it was enjoyable. We walked through eerie dead forests, along steep mountain paths and even jumped in the occasional snow drift. After Rico and I had stopped to wring the water from our socks for the 74^th time, we decided it was time to go back before we got frostbite. Complain as I might about how unprepared we were for it, we certainly enjoyed ourselves. Until about five minutes from the end of our trek, just as we were approaching the bus station again, when it decided to start raining freezing ice, soaking us to our skin. Which certainly made the hour long bus ride back to Kawaguchi-ko a bit less comfortable. Buying that night’s food in the supermarket with my teeth constantly chattering is also an experience I won’t forget in a hurry.

That night, the girls all spontaneously decided that they wanted to leave. It wasn’t because they weren’t having fun, but, um. I don’t know why they left, actually. But they did, which left the guys by themselves to have manly conversations and do manly things. For instance, Rico cooked the most wonderful grilled chicken, infused with a blend of aromatic spices and gently roasted in biscuit crumbs until golden. And Adrian all gave us embroidery tips that I’m sure will come in handy when we need to decorate cushions back home. We met a wonderful family who were moving to Germany the next week, and they cooked many different kinds of Japanese soba noodles for us. We were all very full, but for the sake of politeness everyone forced themselves to eat the food they had cooked just for us. All except me, who rudely went back to the lodge and fell asleep.

We got up early the next morning and said goodbye to our kindly hosts. They were so nice to us, giving us free food and just about helping us with everything we wanted. I don’t know about the other guys, but I was certainly holding back the tears as we waved goodbye to them from our taxi. It was a great weekend, and a wonderful way to spend Golden Week, but once again we had failed to explore the mysterious “suicide forest”. Once again, we’ll have to leave it for next year. One day, Forest of Death, I’ll unravel your mysteries! You mark my words!