Forrest Brown

I when to the Fuji-Q Highland amusement park in Fujiyoshida Japan near the base of Mount Fuji with three Japanese friends, Ayako, Taka, and Kumiko. Taka and I took the bus from Shinjuku while Ayako and Kumiko meet us at Fuji-Q. Becasue the Shinjuku station is such a huge crazy maze of buildings and train platforms Taka and I couldn’t find each other and ended up missing the bus we had planned to take. Fortunately there was another bus, but we had to wait an hour.

Eejanaika is a super gnarly 4D roller-coaster similar to X2 at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles except Eejanaika is higher and faster. What make it a 4D coaster is that the seats can roatate forward or backward 360 degrees independently of the track. The track makes three loops, but your seat flips many times. This makes it super disorientating, you’re never sure which way you or the track is going.

Fujiyama is more of a standard steel roller-coaster, but it’s huge and fast. It’s the world’s eight tallest and fifth longest roller-coaster, and hits a speed of 80mph.

Dodonpa is is a pretty simple roller-coaster, but that doesn’t stop it from being a pretty wild ride. What makes it wild is that it’s all about accelerating ’til blood comes out of your ears and going fast, Dodonpa goes from 0 to 107 mph (172 km/h) in less then 2 seconds. During take-off I thought my eyeballs were going to get squeezed out the back of my head. After the launch it goes down a long straight, around a huge banked turn then up a hill that goes straight up then down the hill going straight down and that’s pretty much it.

The park actually seemed pretty empty until you got in line for one of the roller-coasters. Each of the three main roller-coasters had a little over an hour wait.

A little bit tamer part of the park.

On Wednesday I went with a group of friends to climb Mount Fuji and ski back down. We started climbing at 2299 meters at around 7:30 in the morning. I was able to climb up to 3100 meters by about 14:00 before I was too worn out to go any farther. I have mostly been in Tokyo at sea leave for the past month, so I was really feeling the effects of the thinner air as I climbed Mount Fuji. As I got higher, it got so that I could only take a few steps before I would need to rest and catch my breath.

Unfortunately it was really icy, so the ski down wasn’t that great. It was a fun challenge, but so much work.

The original plan was to ski up the mountain using skins on he bottom of our skis. The skins and special bindings allow a downhill ski to work more like a cross-country ski and you can actually ski up the mountain. Once you reach the top, you can peel the skins off the skis, lock the bindings down and ski like you would normally. Unfortunately it turned out to be too icy for that to work, so we had to put on crampons and carry our skis.

Top of Mount Fuji is 3776 meters (12,388 feet).
Our starting point was 2299 meters (7543 feet).
My max elevation was 3097 meters (10,162).