Climbing Mt.Fuji

I just came back from climbing Mt.Fuji. (The highest mountain in Japan at 3776m.) I wrote earlier, I climb the with a group a got to know through Anna & Freya, the 2 Scottish girls I met in Osaka. They were climbing the mountain in dresses as a charity fund raiser! I took a bus to Kawaguchi yesterday and met the group there. From there we took another bus to the 5th station on the mountain, from where most of the people start the climb. The weather was nice and our spirit high. Everybody looked at us because of the dresses, and tons of people wanted to take pictures.
It took us about 4 hours to climb up to the mountain hut where we booked beds for the night. As we went up, we changed into warmer clothes bit by bit to fight the cold. The terrain got increasingly rougher and steeper, so that we were really exhausted when we finally got to the hut. The bed was freaking expensive at ¥6500 without meals (for a 20 person bunk bed), but we had little choice. We all had dinner and then went to bed early.
At 2am in the middle of the night we got up and started the climb up to the summit, in order to see the sunrise there. None us us could really sleep during the night so we were all awfully tired. (I also hardly slept the night before!) By 2am it was already quite crowded on the trail with tons of people climbing up as well. About 2 hours later we arrived at the summit, just in time for sunrise at 04.30am. The last part really got all of us and we were ready to collapse. On top of Mt.Fuji it was freezing cold at about 0°C. There was still snow and the wind chill made it seem even colder. We sat there with load of other people watching the sunrise. It was nice, but not extremely spectacular. But we were all excited and proud that we made it to the top. After it was light we had a look around the summit, the highest point and the crater. (After all, Mt.Fuji is a volcano!) A bit before 6am we set out for the way down. That was much easier then the way up, but still took 3 hours and a lot of effort. We were back down at the 5th station by 9am. I said goodbye to the others and went back to Tokyo, where I happily collapsed into my bed in the afternoon and slept for quite some hours.