wasn’t long before we realised that the air con unit was actually a hot air con unit - bliss!!! We make ourselves a cup of Japanese tea opened the screens to our windows and sat cross legged drinking tea and looking out to a fantastic sunny clear view of Mount Fuji. We were happy as Larry!!! After our tea drinking and some general faffing around we decided it was time to go out and about and take some photos of the great mountain. The weathers timing couldn’t have been worse!! As soon as we grabbed our coats, hats, gloves and the camera we looked out to see that the cloud had well and truly come in over the mountain and you could hardly see it at all - hmmmm!!!

True Brit styli we went out anyway and it was bitterly cold!!! Undeterred we walked rather briskly round to the lake, which looked very beautiful even in the cold and under very grey skies!!! We decided to take the cable car up the

hill and walk down later on, we weren’t expecting any great views of Fuji from the top viewpoint but Rob had spotted a walk in the guide book that went around the hills. We took the cable car and the views from it were tremendous. We were right in thinking that the views would be non-existent towards Fuji but there were some amazing icicles that had formed on some of the trees. We were amazed by these until we saw that there was a hose that sprayed water onto the trees to form these things - even though it was cheating it still looked great and we have plenty of photos to prove how great they looked!!!

We found the path and did the walk which was great, it was really nice to be out walking in the fresh air and dare I say it cold! It was just starting to get to dusk and we were getting a wee bit edgy as we didn’t have a proper map and it had started snowing!!! We didn’t need to worry for