How to plan a vacation at Fuji-san
Most of you who follow my blog and/or my flickr account will recognize this image.
I t was taken on March 23rd, 2008 at Yamanaka-ko, the most interesting, in my opinion, of the five lakes that surround the fuji mountain.
I loved this image from the very moment I shot it. Of course I was hoping to get a little more yellow and orange sunset-like colors in the sky, but I thought i had been lucky enough to get these beautiful images.
Well, today I found a Japanese website that has a high resolution webcam placed few yards away from where I took this picture from. The webcam shoots an image every minute and the website allows the user to watch online the most recent image, the last 24 hours or even images from any month of the past year!
And so, I started browsing around and found out that I was VERY lucky to get the image above. Feel free to browse, month by month of 2008. For all summer long there were very few interesting days. Mostly Fuji-san kept being covered by a thick layer of clouds with rare exception, until the fall. A few interesting images can be seen on October 29th, November 11th, November 19th. December was a pretty good month with a lot of good sunsets and one amazing sunset in particular on December 22nd.
So I guess the lesson learned is... Winter and early spring are the only good months to go at the Fujigoko region hoping to get some good shots. The second lesson is, to plan to stay a minimum of 2-3 days in order to avoid cloudy days. Honestly I think a 4-5 days short vacation around Fuji-san might be even better.
