Day 14: Cape Muroto - Kochi
Amazingly, I slept reasonably well on the thinnest futon I’ve ever experienced - and the threadbare sheets and the tiny buckwheat shell pillow didn’t make it worse. I woke up around an hour before breakfast, decided that I needed to get the early bus out of there at around 07h20, packed all my stuff, and made it to breakfast right on time.
Breakfast was totally okay, but the atmosphere of that dining room wasn’t great. There was a large, disused room just off it partially obscured by what looked like part of a vinyl billboard wrap - strange - and then of course the TV was showing the news, which was once again Trump-y, which doesn’t do wonders for my digestion. Speaking of which, there’s still something a little funny going on there; without fail, I make it through breakfast fine, but sooner rather than later, I need to hightail it to the can. I think part of the issue is the way my hip belt fits on my pack; it just… hits in a funny way to causes pressure. Anyhow: who wants to hear about that stuff? I scrammed out of there and got on the bus, which took well over an hour to Nahari station. Amusingly, I couldn’t pay my fare properly because the bus bill-changer didn’t work with new 1,000 yen notes (this is a common problem; I had a run-in with a vending machine that had Coke on sale for 100 yen yesterday, but couldn’t get any of my bills to work, grrr). Thankfully, the driver exchanged my new one for one of his old ones; I got off the bus, disappeared into the toilet (you know you’re in a civilized country when it’s clean, free, has a heated seat, AND a bidet function), and then took another bus to the Monet gardens just outside of town. Those were… lovely, I guess, but the damn bus schedules meant I could only spend 25 minutes or 3 hours there, and I didn’t want to hang out at a twee garden all day long, so I cut my visit short and headed back to the station.
From there, it’s just a couple of train stops to Tonohama station, which is about 3 or 4 km down the hill from T27, Konomine-ji, but that is one steep hill - after so many days hiking without a rest, and with carrying my full pack, I found myself running out of steam repeatedly while slogging up that mountain.
As an aside, the above picture is of Tonohama Henro Kun, the mascot for Tonohama station - every station on this private train line has its own mascot and every station has a status of its mascot outside, which is cute as hell.
Anyhow! Almost all the way up to the temple, I found myself completely soaked in sweat. It had stopped raining around sunup, but it was still warm and incredibly humid; everything I had on was soaked through and every bill in my wallet was wet as well. At least I’d had the presence of mine to put my temple stamp book in a dry bag! I stopped at a rest area maybe 100 meters before the actual temple, happily drank a Gatorade-equivalent thing, and left my pack there to make the last push on foot. Amusingly, three French people arrived - and one of them was the woman carrying a small stringed instrument from a few days ago. We chatted for a bit in French, which was cool, but once I got up to the temple and started going through the rituals, they showed up as well and kept chatting loudly amongst themselves. Uh, dudes: would you do that at Notre-Dame? No? Then please don’t do that here, okay?
Every temple has two main places of worship: the main hall, plus a Daishi hall, dedicated to Kukai / Kobo Daishi. That one was tricky to find here as it was even further up and not signed in English, but thankfully I’m starting to recognize a few glyphs just by having seen them so many times. Lately, I find myself thinking an awful lot about Kobo Daishi, wondering what kind of a man he must have been; this commingles in my head with the idea of service, of being of service to others. It strikes me that there are two general modes of worship, at least in my experience; there are those of us who look up to religious figures as examples of how we might be better people - and there are those of us who look up to religious figures as avatars of power that we hope we might become ourselves, if only we praise them hard enough and they show favor to us somehow. Kind of a Carter-Trump dynamic, but it’s late here and I’m not yet ready to write on that topic…
Downhill was easier than uphill & there was a new pilgrim trail sign indicating that there was a faster way to get back to the station on a newer road, so I did exactly that. Once there, I had about an hour to wait until a train to Kochi, so I chatted with my husband Dan for a bit - he was on his way to Smokeout in Las Vegas - and started thinking about how to use my time wisely.
After arriving in Kochi, it was just a couple of minutes walk to my fancy business hotel near the station; my room is exactly what I had hoped for. It’s across the street from a convenience store too, so I put all of my clothes in the washing machine in the hotel + went and got some fixin’s for supper (highballs, pork buns, inarizushi, dried squid, and some kind of a matcha cream bun thing). While waiting for the laundry to dry, I rejiggered the next few days’ schedule to work better for me - this means shorter walks that return back to the hotel, plus two days entirely off that I’ll use to ship some stuff back to California, throw some stuff away, head to Montbell to find some equipment I need, all that kind of thing. And that leaves Sunday entirely free, so I figure I’ll enjoy the famous Sunday market here.
My feet are somewhat trashed at this point - so many blisters! - so some time off of them will help as well, I’m sure. Plus, the new Salomon shoes arrived; they don’t seem all that much wider, but who knows, maybe they’ll do the trick! I’ll try them out tomorrow and see how they go…
Signing off for now,
Random notes:
Saw another badger today, but couldn’t get a picture. Also saw some cool iridescent lizards as well as a number of land crabs - I’d forgotten how common those are on wet forest trails in Japan. Always a surprise to me!
Ran into one of the three European women headed up to T27; the other two had taken the more challenging, longer forest trail. Sounds like they’re doing great! Also ran into a Taiwanese woman I’d seen a few times before at dinner last night; she’s doing great as well. It’s funny how there’s kind of an informal group of us, if only because we all started on approximately the same day and are hiking at about the same pace. I might have skipped 50 km of trail, but I’m also slowing down quite a bit for a few days so I suspect we’ll all catch up with each other again.
Finally, it’d amuse me to no end if someone came up with an inventory of Kobo Daishi statues and organized them by style: young or old? friendly or stern? fat or not? There really doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of consistency there!