Day 17: T31-T32-T33 (from Kochi)
I slept well last night and woke up just before breakfast time - a first for this trip! There are six possible breakfasts on offer at the hotel, one of which is Western, so I thought I’d give that a shot. Um, nope, not great: two enormously thick slices of toast with strawberry jam (good) as well as a bunch of other random quasi-Western stuff such as a cup of not-miso soup (yark), some yogurt (good), two tiny wieners and slices of ham (really not good), and so on. Well, they can’t all be winners, right?
Once again, I threw on my pilgrim kit and headed to the train station to catch the same train I did yesterday; I got off at the same station I ended yesterday’s walk at to continue walking from there. It was a bright, sunny day, not particularly humid, and all in all excellent walking weather. Somehow, I had thought today would be suburban and flat, and that was not exactly how things were to turn out…
The first couple of k were indeed flat, but not all that suburban. I reached the Kochi Museum of Art in about an hour and stepped inside to check it out - yeah, nothing all that interesting, but a nicely designed building. No idea why they had three Chagalls; those seemed wildly out of step with the rest of their collection. There was a special exhibition on from a Japanese artist (local?) who had painted watercolors in the USA for a while; most of his stuff was female nudes that verged on tasteful porn from the 1940s.
From there, things got a bit more suburban; apropos of nothing, I walked past a shop called Kuma no toumin which I think means ‘the bear’s hibernation’ but the top Google result is for an anime called Caressing The Nipples of My Hibernating Bear which I think is funny as hell.
The first temple today was at the top of a fairly steep hill and more or less smack dab in the middle of an enormous botanical garden; the pilgrim trail snuck in the back side of the garden which was a cool way to avoid paying admission. Given the close proximity of the temple to the garden, it was far busier than usual, complete with random American tourists for some reason. I paid an extra 800 yen to see their treasure collection and their garden, which was lovely, even if I couldn’t get a good picture of it. Honestly, the best thing was probably the tranquility of it; when you charge 500 yen to get in a garden, chances are good it’ll be empty, so it was lovely to just sit there for a while and enjoy the beautiful space.
The trail down from T31 was in abysmal shape and the vending machines were sold out of the tea that I wanted, but no worries, I am here to walk so walk I did. It felt like a fairly long way to T32; you had to get back off of the mountain, go along a river for a long ways, and then climb another mountain to the south as the next temple was on top of that one. T32 had a lovely view out to sea but wasn’t much to look at itself; on the plus side, though, they were selling tasty homemade sweetened popped rice, which served as my lunch. (I also took the chance to restock on candles, having run out at the Daishi temple there.) I was well ahead of schedule, so figured I’d just press on ahead to T33, which was only a couple of hours ahead.
That walk was okay - down the mountain, then suburban back streets for most of the rest of it. I stopped in at a supermarket to use their washroom and to buy some lunch (two mystery rice balls, a drink, a red-bean-and-cream thing) and ran into a Californian I’d met yesterday, an amiable fellow from Sacramento out for a walk. We left together and headed for the no-charge pedestrian ferry on the way to the next temple; I enjoyed our conversation, especially the bit where it kind of devolved into a Bill and Ted as Buddhists kind of thing. (You had to be there.)
The ferry was on time, the next temple was close by. One of only three Zen temples on the trail, it felt faintly neglected and had a fruit stand in the middle of it for some reason… okay. Not much to see there, just another one to check off of the list - and then make a run for the bus stop around the corner. It wasn’t too long before we were back in Kochi; I took a tram to my hotel and he walked to his. I had a highball and a bath and agreed to meet the Belgian for supper in a couple of hours, checked on the status of the new-new shoes (shipped, due in tomorrow), and wrote this post.
Random notes:
No high quality cat sightings, just skittish ones that ran away and one slightly injured cat too dazed to move, poor thing.
Vending machine drinks usually run from 120 to 180 yen, depending on what it is and how big the bottle is. There is, however, a brand of vending machine that only sells stuff that costs 100 yen. So far, almost everything I’ve tried from those machines have been pretty bad. This was no exception:
Kudos to the boat owner who stenciled DON’T GET SO CLOSE I JUST FARTED on the back of their boat along with a Calvin-peeing-on-something image. It’s always nice to see a bit of American culture mixed in with all of the traditional Japanese stuff!