Ocean Day (1)

This must be somewhere after 6th station...
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It was really an accident that I had mount Fuji hike and open water swimming compeition in the same weekend. This long weekend is the ocean day, 海の日, in Japan (this day must have something to do with sushi). I was a bit worried beforehand thinking I might not be able to get through this long weekend. The plan is to leave Tokyo on Sunday morning just past midnight, go straight to the 5th base station of Mount Fuji and start the hike before 3am. The traffic was surprisingly light at 1am from Tokyo, it took us less than 2 hours to Mount Fuji. However, the queue to get to the parking lot at 5th base station is like 3 to 4 hours long. We were all very disappointed and almost wanted to give up (actually, I was secretly happy about giving up, at least I can go back home and have a good night sleep), we saw a taxi driving pass by.

My colleague quickly formulated the solution, we parked our car in some parking lot then call the taxi. We stopped by a 7-11 to stock up the food and water. At the same time, I thought, it might be not easy to find any available taxi at 3am in the mountain area. Regardless, we got the local taxi company's phone number from the nice 7-11 clerk and the only Japanese colleague ordered the cab over the phone.

As we were unpacking and packing the hiking gear outside of the convenient store, a Taxi driving by. I went jumping up and down, waving like mad and the taxi stopped. Using my broken Japanese to let the cabbie know that we need to go to the 5th station, um, while I was struggling, my Japanese colleague came to my rescue. Soon afterward, We were on the way to start our hike!