Day 19: Kochi - T34
Dang it, I slept like hell last night. For the first night since leaving home, I managed to have a hotel-neighbor who would get up and crash into things every couple of hours, waking me up in the process. Not great, but of course also not the worst!
Before going to bed I finished sorting the pack out and getting the box I’d bought from Japan Post ready to ship out the next morning. The pack was feeling really good weight-wise, but once I added in the pilgrimage gear (vest, stole, incense, candles, stamp book, lighter, nameslips, etc.) it tipped over into Annoyingly Heavy territory again, but only just. At least I think I’ve figured out how to get everything in there without causing additional stress on the seams - it’s a weird pack, it’s got a huge zippered flap you’d think would be useful for packing, but no, it works best if you leave that zipped and treat it as an old-school backpack, harumph.
Up too early as well thanks to the noisy neighbor, so I just kind of loafed in bed for a while. I knew today would be a short day, only 12 km or so of walking with zero elevation gain, so how to pad things out? Well, once I got back from breakfast, I got down to the task of sending a small box of leftover stuff home to Dan. That… was trickier than I would have suspected. The last time I mailed a package internationally, all I had to do was go to the post office and do whatever they told me to do, but in Japan, it’s a bit more complicated and requires a website and a color printer. Thankfully, the website works in English, but it’s designed to eventually print a very detailed Customs form, so I found myself entering things like ‘used bags, 5× 100g, average cost JPY 200’ and so on, being careful to list everything in the box and guess at individual items’ weight so that it’d add up to approximately the correct weight, which is… wait, I have no idea, but given that Japanese are fond of sending luggage ahead to their next hotel, the hotel had a scale at the front desk on loan from Yamato Transport, who specialize in that (among other things). Easy enough, the scale looked like it wasn’t tared correctly, so let’s guess 1800g and work backwards from there. Finally, I had a workable shipment form from the Japan Post website as a PDF, but how to print that?
Turns out that’s an easily-solved problem. Two of the three major convenience store chains are integrated with Sharp’s Network Print app; once you’ve created an account with Sharp, you can upload the PDF to their cloud, then go to Family Mart or Lawson, log in to their multifunction fax-print-copy machine, and pay to print the PDF that you just uploaded. Only 60 yen for a color printout - not bad! So now I’ve got one box of stuff, a printout of the proper Customs and other paperwork, and it’s now 9 am and the post office is open… they have free packing tape, yay, and it doesn’t matter if there’s a language barrier if all of your paperwork is correct, really, so a few more minutes and a very friendly postal agent has corrected the weight on the form (off by 140 grams), saving me a dollar or so, and has taken me through checking the right boxes and signing the right things on the paperwork to get that box back home to California. Boom.
Back up to the room; I’ve repacked because it’s raining now, boo. And I’ve appropriated a giant plastic bag from the extra pillow library at the hotel because Amazon returns are fairly simple & they’ve agreed to take Pair #3 back, no cost, and issue a full refund. Although many Amazon returns are as easy as heading to Family Mart or Lawson and returning your stuff there, for some reason this return wants me to go to a Yamato Transport office. Thankfully, there’s one right around the corner from T33, where I finished up my walk two days ago; I was planning on heading right back to where I left off and picking up from there, so that’s no problem at all.
I didn’t want to hang around the hotel any longer, so I checked out and took the streetcar almost all the way to its terminus; there were 20 minutes until the bus I needed came along, so I walked a ways until I found a Family Mart and bought some maple Calorie-Mate for my lunch later on. I got on the bus, and heh, the same Californian I last saw on that bus coming from T33 was on the bus going to T33 along with the Czech woman I’d met a couple of days ago. Cool - and then a Spaniard got on the bus as well and hey, four Westerners headed back on the pilgrim trail in the rain.
I had intended to head straight for the shipping depot - carrying around a giant cardboard box wrapped in plastic is annoying - but the Spaniard had never been to a Shingon Buddhist temple before, it wasn’t raining that bad, and so I did my best to give him a 5-minute overview of Shinto vs. Buddhism, take him through the basics of visiting a Buddhist temple, and so on. (I wasn’t about to fish the dry bag out of my pack and go through all of the rituals, though, as I didn’t want to get my stamp book wet!)
Once that was done, I took off for the Yamato Transport office nearby. Amusingly, I saw this timid fella hiding out under one of their trucks:
The Yamato logo has a black cat carrying a smaller cat in its mouth; ‘black cat’ is therefore slang for the company as well. The friendly agent helped me scan the QR code Amazon had sent, then slapped a label on the box, gave me a receipt, and that was that. One thing that I found interesting: Amazon shipped the shoes in their shoebox without any extra packaging, just a couple pieces of flimsy tape in place to keep it shut. Somehow I don’t think that’d work in North America!
It didn’t take long to get to T34, Tanema-ji - easy enough walking, it rained the whole way but I stayed dry, and there’s not more than that to report. As I was about to go take a leak, a friendly Japanese with I assume his parents took an interest in me and started up a conversation, which I was happy to join; they seemed surprised that I’d walked all the way from Tokushima, but even more charmingly, his Mom made it clear that she was amused by my having such a big belly in spite of all the exercise! Super cute :)
By a good stroke of luck, there were two dry benches conveniently positioned near the stamp office, so I was able to take my pack’s rain cover off, fish out the dry bag, and change into pilgrim garb without getting anything wet. Even better, the overall layout was such so that you could mostly get around with only brief exposure to the rain. I did what I had to do, then asked the monk on duty to stamp my book - which he did, but then also reached under his desk to find me a small pack of cookies as well. What a nice guy! So yeah, big fan of T34. Friendly visitors, friendly monks, good vibes all around.
Just a few more kilometers - still raining, still not enough to be a problem - and I was at the onsen where I’d booked a room for the night. Even though it was only 14h00, they were happy to give me a room right away, which was fantastic - I went about getting everything as dry as I could for the morning, then checked out the baths. Verdict: smelly water, yecch, and weirdly busy for a Monday afternoon as well (is Golden Week already getting going?). Too crowded to be comfortable, and the more people there are, the less comfortable I am as an obvious foreigner, given that I’m twice the size of most of the men here and furry to boot. I washed up, had a perfunctory soak in the least-crowded pool, and decamped to my room. (I might head back tomorrow morning early to try the baths again - hopefully they’re not busy at 6 am.)
Given that I had a few hours before supper, I decided it’d be a good time to rethink some accommodations and logistics for the last week or two of the trip, so late May, early June. I’m starting to get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, how far I can walk without issues, and how easy it is (or not) to take trains, buses, and so on. There’s a complicated stretch (temples from the mid-60s to the early 70s) that has a couple of difficult to reach temples with no lodging nearby, but I finally figured out a mostly not inconvenient way to see them (there are a couple of 30-minute bus rides at annoying time intervals, but that’s the best you can do). In keeping with the whole idea of making the most of my time here and not worrying about walking every kilometer of the original trail, I also moved things around a bit to avoid a 30 plus km slog (road walking, flat, not much to see) and replace it with a train ride plus visits to two other temples not on the main route (trail walking, elevation gain, nice forests) instead. That works for me.
Dinner tonight was okay, nothing special, but it got the job done. If anything, I found myself again amused at the sheer consistency in terms of what’s for dinner and how it’s prepared; there were no real surprises tonight and that’s fine! Rice, miso soup, pickles, sashimi, seared bonito, chawanmushi, and as a bonus, some pork and cabbage cooked at the table. Misjudging the situation, I arrived at dinner wearing clothes, but this is an onsen, so when the other dinner guests arrived, all Japanese, they were wearing yukata. Whoops. I’m staying at another onsen tomorrow, a fancy one, so I’ll switch get-ups there and see if I fit in any better!
Random notes:
While waiting to check in tonight two Australians (or maybe Kiwis?) were trying to check in, but they were having a hell of a time with the entire shoe situation. I was doing my best to not jump in and ‘help’ (mansplain?) but eventually I went for it just because it was taking so long! Japan is very particular about footwear; if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to do the wrong thing (repeatedly, in their case!). When you arrive at an onsen (and other places such as the Kochi castle museum yesterday), you’ll see a bunch of tiny lockers. Those are meant for shoes; you should remove your street shoes before stepping up onto the floor and put those in a locker. Then, there should be slippers for you to wear inside the place. What was confusing today was that there were not only slippers, but also clogs (i.e., Crocs-like footwear). Slippers are for inside, the gardening shoes/Crocs/clogs etc. are for outside. This onsen has two buildings; you need to switch from slippers to clogs to walk the 20 meters between the two before changing back into slippers once you’re at the other building. And of course there’s yet another pair of slippers to change into in the toilets, but I digress…
I wish I knew why maple is a relatively common flavoring here! I love maple flavored things - but wait a second, duh, Japanese maple is obviously a thing that exists, so I guess you can make syrup from that too? Yum.
If there’s any one food I’m missing at this point in the trip, it’s builder’s tea (black tea, milk, sugar). The ‘royal milk tea’ they have here is pretty good, but it’s too sweat and doesn’t have that rumbly, tannic Assam bassline that I love so much. I’m making do with bottled café lattes and whatever tea is on offer at breakfast, but yeah, I wish I had a proper cuppa instead most mornings.