April 20, 2025

Day 11: Mugi-Shishikui

I didn’t see David the Englishman at dinner last night, so I sent him a picture of me taken at another table in the restaurant - a family was sitting down to dinner together & had an absolutely enormous boat-tray thing filled with sashimi on their table and invited me to have my picture taken with it. (As a single diner, my portion was far less dramatic but still far from negligible and ridiculously good). He came downstairs shortly thereafter to say hi - he hadn’t been aware, I think, that Rakuten (the Japanese travel and hotel booking website - pro tip: if it asks you to switch to English, don’t do that as most of their hotels only show up on the Japanese version of their website) had different ‘plans’ available for most lodgings. Typically, you’ll see things like overnight only, overnight and breakfast, overnight and 2 meals, and then things can get wildly complicated from there. For example, the first night of my pilgrimage, I chose a plan that included eel kaiseki because dang it, I love eel and almost never get the chance to have it. Other hotels I’ve seen have had options like gift cards (maybe useful if work is paying for the booking and isn’t paying attention?), souvenirs or treats to take back home, all-you-can-drink plans (danger!), that kind of thing.

The gist of our conversation last night revolved around the physical challenges of a pilgrimage like this. He’s about my age, perhaps a little bit older, and had recently had knee replacement surgery, so he’s still getting a handle on how much his body can handle without running entirely on ibuprofen. Me, my challenges so far have revolved entirely around my feet (bad shoes, narrow shoes, blisters, etc.) and fitness issues not so much - much to me surprise (and relief) I haven’t had any issues with dual 500 meter climbs, endless downhill stairs (my knees are fine), or stamina in general. That being said, I have essentially come to the conclusion that I’m here for the spiritual aspects of the trail, the especially beautiful or interesting parts of the trail, definitely the food, tourist attractions along the way, and not so much being a completist. As much as I like the idea of walking every kilometer of the trail - I did that with the Moselsteig, for example, and the Chemin Stevenson - I don’t think doing so is really going to add to my enjoyment or, well, get me closer to enlightenment. My informal goal for myself is to walk 20 km every day, more if it’s especially interesting or beautiful, but to not worry about taking shortcuts or public transit as needed to maximize the pleasure of being here.

My first big skip was the 21 km or so from T22 to T23. The trail didn’t look especially interesting - mostly road walking- and having already walked 11 km through a beautiful forest in the morning, I decided I’d rather take a detour to see that cat shrine, which was worth it. I still got to my hostel on time, felt better for having walked less, and don’t regret it. What’s interesting is that almost every pilgrim I’ve run into has decided the same; although I’m pretty sure the three European women, for example, are walking every kilometer, I’ve seen a lot of pilgrims at bus stops, train stations, etc.

Today was another skip: about 8 km from Awa-Kainan to the town of Shishikui where I’m staying tonight. In this case, I did it because I wanted to ride the DMV, the Dual-Mode Vehicle, from end to end.

The DMV is essentially a bus that also has a railway undercarriage - using specially designed ramps and transfer stations, it can approach the end of a railway line, change modes, and continue on the rails (or vice versa). I’ve run into bus spotters and trainspotters in Japan before and today was no different; of the three passengers on the DMV service, it was pretty clear that everyone was there just to say they’d ridden the thing. Me, I was especially intrigued by Kannoura station, which was previously the end of the local railway line, but which now has a train-to-bus connector and a newly constructed spiral ramp down to ground level. (Previously, the trains would just stop there and reverse out from the elevated platforms.)

One more thing about fitness: I do feel good that I, a 55-year-old dude who spent his entire life working behind a computer, am able to do this kind of thing. It’s a long story and I won’t bore you with all of here, but I started working for a medical device manufacturer in 2007. That job involved travel to a number of hospitals (fewer as time went on and we worked out wireless network bugs in the product), where I saw first-hand a bunch of dudes who looked like myself in pretty bad shape. I was just shy of 285 pounds at the time, couldn’t walk far without having to rest, all of that stuff, and I didn’t want to be like that forever, so I started walking the nature trail near my office every day at 10 am (I had a standing meeting on my Outlook calendar to block the time). I started eating better - yogurt and muesli and tea, the same three things from Trader Joe’s for workday lunches, reasonable meals for supper - and after about a year of that I hit a BMI that was neither overweight nor obese for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t love the way that looked - I mean, I looked okay, but not particularly bearish, and I do love men with some meat on their bones - so I dialed everything back a bit, concentrating on walking and fitness and less so on being so careful with eating. By the time I hit 50, I was still doing fine; the pandemic changed that a bit (less walking, more stress-eating), but on the whole I’ve still managed okay. Over the past few years, I’ve had some great hiking vacations, some of which were extremely tough (I hiked the Via Alpina with Dan from Vaduz to Montreux a few years back and oh man, the Alps are tall and those passes are steep!). So, thankfully, I’m still reasonably fit even if I’ve gained about 20 pounds over the past year (which already feels like it’s going away again).

So! David was already on his way off to his next destination when I went down to breakfast; we chatted briefly and confirmed that we both had the same general game plan: to mix things up a bit, take buses and trains for the long boring bits, and get to Kochi, the next large city, more quickly than planned so that we could do a series of day trips with a light day pack to knock off more temples (rather than do them in a straight line while carrying our complete packs). Sounds great to me.

The morning walk was unexceptional; Mugi is a smallish fishing town that looked pretty battered. This was followed by a road walk until I went up and over the hill to Saba Daishi, aka B4. Bekkaku temples are a separate set of 20 temples; think of them kind of like a bonus round of temples that somehow didn’t make the A-list, but which are special in their own right.

I entered into the temple compound from the back, having come in on the old pilgrim trail and not from the front, where the modern road and train station are. Unusually for these temples, this one does let you roam around inside the temple (once you’ve taken your shoes off, of course!). The main temple hall had the feeling of a cozy overstuffed living room, filled with bric-a-brac; surprisingly, a door at the back of the main temple led into a modern bunker sort of thing that was wonderfully strange (to me). Although you can barely see it in that picture, there were small cans of coffee, sometimes sake, in front of all of the… what are they? images? along the right-hand side of the corridor, which was more than twice as long as what you see here with additional doors I didn’t dare open that went further back into the hillside. Cool.

It also looked like they had overnight guests that’d stayed the night there - the staff were preparing a large tray of canned coffee and as I was leaving, a number of pilgrims emerged from another part of the compound, said prayers, and boarded a tour bus. (Their website says they stopped lodging pilgrims in 2022, but maybe that’s changed?) The head priest saw them off, noticed me, and was kind enough to wish me a good morning and to welcome me to Japan. That felt good!

From there, it was another couple of hours’ walk to the northern terminus of the DMV, which was mostly so-so, save for the occasional deserted Pacific beaches seemingly waiting for summer campsites to open, surfers to arrive, and/or fishing boats to return from the morning catch. One interesting bit was a detour along the old road, which paralleled the new road, but with a 1920-built tunnel and absolutely zero traffic. A bit further down the road was an Iseki rice-milling kiosk; I had first seen these outside of Tokushima, but didn’t bother to learn what they were until today. I’ve also seen rice-selling kiosks, but these just mill it. Curious!

Also of interest was a newly-constructed seawall-sort-of-thing in one town with huge retractable entryways - it looks like it was all designed to close up in the event of a tsunami etc to protect the town’s structures. Never seen that before either!

Finally, I got to my destination: the okonomiyaki restaurant opposite the DMV terminus. It didn’t look super open, what with it being a Sunday and all, so I set down my pack to pack it up for lunch - and then the chef popped out for a cigarette and to say hi. Surprise, he spoke fantastic English and also made a damn good okonomiyaki; I hadn’t had once since going to Toronto some time back and was jonesing for one severely at this point.

After lunch, I wandered around the Awa-Kainan cultural center, which was baffling, sort of. I wasn’t interested in their katana museum, so just hung out until the brain? truss? no, DMV arrived. It was a moderately interesting experience; only row 1 of seats has any legroom, so it was cramped as heck, but whatever, it was only a 30 minute ride or so. It’s a bit janky when it switches modes, but it does what it says on the tin. After arriving at a roadside station on the northern end of Shishikui, I wandered around the gift shop, bought a Deep Ocean Water Salt doughnut, charged my phone and enjoyed the doughnut, and then walked north to the 7-Eleven to use their ATM and buy lunch for tomorrow’s long walk. I also tried a sweet potato smoothie for the first time (verdict: okay, but watching the 7-Eleven smoothie machine in action was absolutely worth it) and wound up chatting with an ex-pat American musician-composer from Ojai who was working with the local orchestra on a newly commissioned piece. Funny, the kind of people you run into in the middle of nowhere!

From there, just a short 20 minutes’ walk to tonight’s lodgings, a lovely old house filled with antiques, no other guests, and dinner about an hour from now. Yum.

Three more walking days until I’ll take a bus and train to the city of Kochi, get my new shoes, and check into a comfortable hotel for five nights. I’ll also cross the Kochi-Tokushima border tomorrow morning - exciting!

Random notes:

Although I do love walking, I do not love backpacking; I can’t imagine hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, for example. I’m absolutely fine with long walking days just as long as I know I have a clean bed and a good meal waiting for me. I’m a little bit soft like that.

I first encountered Japanese bus spotters back in 2016, when I convinced a few friends to come to Japan for a few weeks. (One of them, Chris Glass, produced a beautiful book as a souvenir afterwards - thank you, Chris!) At the end of one of the hiking days on the Kumano Kodo, we had to take a short bus ride to our inn at Yunomine Onsen (the only World Heritage listed hot spring, I think) - and there was a small group of friends on the bus, fairly giddy at that point in the day, having been on that bus for over five hours (!) - it’s the longest bus route in all of Japan that doesn’t go on a highway. Wild!