Spindle: Suvarnabhumi Airport is a strange place. There’s the usual sweeping glass façade and branched terminal structure, but shops and restaurants in its interior can’t save it from a contrasting brutalist feel reeking of windigo anatomy. There are untreated concrete pillars and beams visible every other turn, while the opaque sections of roofs glisten more like draped fabric than hard steel. Chinese advertisements with no Thai are prominent, evidently catering to the shopaholics.
 
Parcly Taxel: Luna’s delay morphed into a blessing in disguise, cutting off a good chunk of time spent in “limbo with Somnambula”. Spindle as my third eye brought me safely into Narita on daybreak, after a flight of five and a quarter hours. I sighted upon landing those representative cultural constructs: rock gardens among bamboo, convenience stores, the like. Are these objects alone a good description of what contemporary Japan is? We would find out ourselves over the coming days.
 
Spindle: As usual, we had to traverse a bevy of rail lines to reach our first accommodation in Fujiyoshida (富士吉田): the Narita Express to Shinjuku, the world’s busiest railway station and a mini-city unto itself, then Chūō to Ōtsuki (大月), then the private Fujikyu Railway (富士急) to Fujisan Station.
 
Parcly: Already the first and longest ride was interesting for bisecting itself at Tokyo Main, where the first six cars of twelve would go towards Yokohama instead. The view outside presented a rollercoaster of development, from open fields into commuters on Yamanote (山手線) platforms, the Skytree behind, shorter buildings of bewildering sizes, isolated bands of houses and finally the great forested mountain ranges.
 
How I love ponies splitting into cuddly pieces! They help explore parts of bodies, both familiar and foreign, in ways often unexpected. Through three and a half hours of tiredness and quietness, I arrived at the accommodation in one piece, where I managed to catch some “flask time”.
 
Spindle: Melting snow presented itself on the Fujikyu part of our journey, though it was reduced to spots when we settled down. The cold and wind together were amazing, especially to Parcly’s ears which were blown out fresh. For a long-awaited lunch we headed back to Fujisan Station’s neighbouring food court and had the town’s local specialty – very thick, chewy udon with fishcake shaped like Mount Fuji.
 
Despite its position as the main offloading point for tourists visiting the Mount Fuji area, Fujiyoshida feels pretty neglected, with only heavy vehicles plying the roads after winter nightfall. Day-trippers from Tokyo usually take the Fujikyu for two more stops (alighting at Lake Kawaguchi) to begin their sightseeing, only coming here transiently on their return to the capital. It’s cold enough that emissions are very visible when vehicles idle or start to move.
 
Parcly: I was so exhausted after travelling by wing, train and hoof just to reach the place I would stay in first. I just bought pre-packaged oyster rice from the supermarket for dinner, as well as other foodstuffs I would need for the remaining breakfasts I would have here. Then I fell into my bed, spontaneously breaking into half at my stomach before being pulled inside my bottle, where all that fatigue would wash away in fluid motion…