Day 16: T28-T29-T30 (from Kochi)
It’s late, well after dinner, and I’m exhausted, so please forgive the quality of this post…
I started the day off by heading down to breakfast; a couple joined the elevator, one of whom was wearing an Anza-Borrego shirt, and one of whom was obviously Western, so I thought I’d ask if they were from San Diego? Close enough, they were visiting from northern San Diego county - she was Japanese, he was American, and they’d met at university forever ago and still liked to travel to Japan every so often. We had breakfast together; the stewed bonito bowl was good but reminded me visually a little too much of Trader Joe’s canned tuna for cats, yeesh.
After breakfast, I threw on my pilgrim’s togs and hopped a train to Nochi station; as agreed the day before, I was planning to meet up with the Belgian cub and walk together today, a full day’s walk to three temples. For the first time, I wasn’t carrying even a backpack, just a pilgrim’s satchel with the pilgrimage basics (stamp book, name slips, incense, candles, etc.), so I was feeling pretty good. On the other hand, it quickly became apparent that the new 31-wide shoes weren’t going to solve the problem either as my right foot is apparently really more of a 32 than a 31 and was not at all happy with its new, shorter-but-wider shoe, sigh. Regardless, walking was pretty good, even if the humongous blister on the underside of my left foot mostly spent the whole day remind me (painfully) of its presence. I swear, I love walking, but damn, it’s not that fun when your body is conspiring against you!
The Belgian met up with me shortly after I got off of the train and we settled in nicely. The first temple up, Dainichi-ji, T28, was notable mostly for its multiple gardeners using gas leaf blowers to tidy up the place; the incessant noise made it a lil bit difficult to make with the spirituality already, but I did my best. They also amusingly offered free Wi-Fi, which is pretty far down on my list of things I want in a Buddhist temple experience, but hey. Very kind of them. My buddy stopped in at their shop to buy a drink, I went and used the squat toilet - not easy for a man of my height, and it mostly went well enough, but when you’re as tall as I am, you can’t really get in the correct position because there’s no room for your knees. Add in a friendly bear-size belly and, um, well, you just gotta hope for the best. I thought I did a fine job, but let’s just say that I could’ve done better and the less said about that, the better…
From there, it was 9 kilometers to the next temple. Thankfully, the walking was good, mostly level, and also mostly on back roads, not busy highways like some of the previous walks. The sun wasn’t too hot, the wind was incessant but manageable, and the company was good. However, a few km before we got to the next temple, my buddy’s sciatica flared up, so I carried his pack for him for a few km.
Once we arrived at Kokobun-ji, T29, we both found ourself in awe of the place - it was a dramatic change from endless walking through rice paddies and suburbs and suddenly finding ourselves in what felt like a miniature forest. They keep a beautiful garden there - it was dreamlike.
It was getting close to 13h00 and the cub hadn’t had breakfast, so it was time for lunch. I’d seen a hamburger restaurant nearby called 5019 PREMIUM FACTORY that was only about 2 minutes off of the trail, so away we went. It was fantastic - one of the best burgers I’ve ever had. First class Japanese beef grilled over locally produced charcoal, with good fries and a few interesting sauces. Oh man that was good! And then afterwards it was only another 7 km or so to T30, Zenraku-ji, which was as anticlimactic as they get - just meh. Apparently there were two T30s for a long time until they resolved the dispute recently - I want to visit the ‘other’ T30 just to see if it’s as anodyne as the ‘official’ T30. The highlight of that place was for me meeting the first Californian since I started walking, a young fella from Sacramento who’d taken a day off to watch the Kings lose a championship game, LOL. Anyhow! It was getting late, I was getting tired, and it was only another 1.5 km to a train station, so we headed for that and the end of our walking day, about 24 km total, give or take.
The train was absolutely jam-packed with Japanese high school girls; it took so long for everyone to board that the schedule slipped and it took way longer than expected to get back to Kochi. Once there, though, I bade the Belgian adieu, he headed to his hotel, and I to mine. I drank an especially classy canned highball, took a nice long bath, and got ready for dinner, which I’d reserved at a place called Izariya.
I know so-called ‘fine dining’ isn’t for everyone, but for me it’s a rare treat and something I enjoy immensely. Yes, it’s expensive - I think tonight’s dinner ran about US $200 - but it doesn’t seem all that expensive to me compared to a Broadway show or a day at Disneyland, and I think of all three things as roughly similar. A good dinner is very much a performance to me & tonight’s was a great example of the form, being a sort-of kaiseki meal, i.e., a multi-course meal that follows certain traditions, but which in this case was also very European in other ways.
The restaurant wasn’t too hard to find; I had reserved a counter seat. There were two other customers tonight, two women, perhaps a mother and daughter, at the other end of the counter. The chef/owner himself was present; he didn’t speak much English, but one of the four restaurants he owns is in Madrid, where he spends about half of every year, so we spoke Spanish. Another member of the team spoke shockingly good English, having spent some time as an exchange student in West Virginia. And away we went on what would probably the third kaiseki style meal for me ever, after a restaurant in Kyoto and a visit to Den in Tokyo more recently.
There’s no menu; I saw that they were offering a beverage pairing in the European style, so went with that. So, about $140 for dinner and $70 for drinks, including tax and service; that isn’t cheap, but I don’t think you could have an experience anything like that for $210 in the USA. The two other diners were roughly on the same timeframe, so it was wonderful to see the cook prepare things right in front of us and then serve them along with a brief explanation. Now, I really hate to take pictures of things during a meal - it seems rude on some level and distracts from the flow - but man, I wish I had just to remember some of the things. The beverage pairings included a couple of sakes, a small beer, a Chablis, a rosé from Napa Valley, a Japanese-made pinot noir from the South Island of New Zealand, tea, sherry… all of which were delicious. And the food? So many delicacies, most of them locally sourced, all of them delicious, but one of them really stood out for me: hanazansho, which is in season for a little less than two weeks; it’s the flowers of the budo sansho or Japanese pepper, which is about as seasonal and as Japanese as it gets.
Ultimately, though, it’s that ineffable sense of hospitality that gets me every time - as with the other times I’ve had kaiseki meals, it’s the little things. For example, they noticed that I’m left-handed, so rearranged my place setting about halfway in to make it easier for me. And the final course blew me away, just for being so culturally alien to me as an American as well as being so very Japanese: as is traditional, the last dish was rice, in this case served three ways. The first was a simple, small bowl of perfectly cooked rice. That’s it. Just as a reminder, I believe, that the entire Japanese cuisine revolves around that. Elegant, simple, good. And then rice again, but this time (the chef said, jokingly), as Japanese paella, cooked with tiny shrimps and other things, no saffron but Japanese herbs instead, which was both strange and familiar. And then finally, rice again, plain again, but with a little bit of salt.
The weirdest thing, though, was that that first bowl of rice gave me sensory flashbacks to my childhood in California; unlike other Japanese rice I’ve had, this tasted different and much more like what Californian-grown rice tastes like. No idea why, but it was moving. And then it was time for tea, fresh citrus, homemade ice cream, and finally a bit of Basque cheesecake and again that good salt.
Two and a half hours of amazing cooking, fantastic drinks, and above all that sense of being looked after by people very much at the top of their game? I loved it.
Yes, tomorrow I’ll go back to eating out of convenience stores for meals, mostly, but damn was it good to be present for a meal like that.
So that’s it for today. I’ve splurged on one more pair of shoes, hoping that the third time’s a charm; they’re Asics, but so ugly that Amazon was offering them for half-price; they’re 32 2E, so will hopefully finally work. Ugh. I hate to be that guy that spends the first two weeks of his two-month hike ordering new shoes, but I really don’t have much of a choice as no store stocks anything that big in Japan, so it’s all a matter of buying online and then praying that they fit.
Random notes:
Uniqlo underwear verdict: the pair that looks good didn’t work all that well as the legs were too short. The other pair works well, but the waistband rolls too easily as I do have a bit of a tummy. Still, better than the old American underwear that’s falling apart!
I found a 4GB DIMM in the middle of the street today!
For some reason, I’ve hit my head on more things today than I care to admit, the last of them being a light fixture at the restaurant. I’ve never felt so tall in my life and it’s annoying!