Up at the crack of dawn this morning as we were picking up the sightseeing again and heading to Mt. Fuji. We couldn't miss that! Who goes to Japan and doesn't see Mt. Fuji?

We left the hotel at 7am and got on the metro at Shinjuku-sanchome and got off one stop later at Shinjuku. Our train wasn't for about 40 minutes, it took quite a bit of figuring out as the boards don't actually list the stops the train makes, only the final destination. Thank god for wifi.

Our first train took about an hour and a half and we got off and changed at Otsuki to a private line to Karaguchi-ko which is the Lake District around the mountain. This little train seemed to take forever and stopped at every station. As soon as we got on it though, we could see the spectacular, iconic mountain straightaway. Thinking we would get better pictures when we got off the train we left our cameras alone.

When we finally got off the train at Karaguchi-ko station, half the mountain was covered by clouds. There was so much to do in this area, next visit we are going to spend a bit more time here. There was a sightseeing bus, so we got tickets for that and jumped on, again not getting a seat. We headed up to the end stop, it was snowing when we got there. The snow amused Darren no end, he made a little snowman and ran his fingers over the powdery freshly laid snow. It was wonderful seeing him experience this for the first time, I can still remember Sara's amusement on my first real encounter with snow in Moscow.

At this point the mountain was completely covered by cloud, but we hung around and the sun came out. It only took about half an hour to burn away most of the cloud and we got some good photos. The mountain kind of curved up at a very slow steady inclination and is not really near the other mountains around it and of course the peak was covered in snow. It truly was an amazing sight to see.

We got back on the bus and went to another view point, however the mountain was almost completely clouded over again by this time. We walked around the lake in the freezing cold for a while and then went and did a bit of last minute souvenir shopping. Everything here was open, unlike in Tokyo. We had lunch at the place called Hana, which was a Hawaiian themed Japanese BBQ place. You got raw meat and cooked it on the BBQ plate in the middle of the table. It was fun and a really good meal. It was amazing value too as you got desert with it, awesome New York cheesecake.

After lunch and shopping we got back on the bus, back to the station and managed to get a direct (albeit very slow) train back to Shinjuku by paying the difference between the lines. Once we arrived at Sinjuku, we decided to get a cab, which didn't actually happen. We were both hungry and out of money so we needed to find a 7/11 (which had the only ATM's that work with foreign cards). It was so cold I could barely function and while stumbling around we managed to find not only the 7/11, but the street our hotel is off, so we decided against the cab. We grabbed some take away and walked back to the Shinjuku Granbell, watched TV and recuperated from our big day.