Day 22: B5-Nakatosa
It’s a little after 5 pm as I’m writing today’s entry. I’m sitting on a sort-of-Western chair at a table that is still too low for me to get my knees etc. underneath it. I don’t know the correct terms for these things, but I’m sitting in the bit of a traditional Japanese hotel room that’s between the tatami-mat part where you sleep and the windows; there are four of those floor-to-ceiling windows here and I’ve left the doors slightly ajar to make it easier to hear the waves crashing on the shore outside. As is the case with nearly every traditional Japanese hotel room I’ve seen, there’s a large round box with tea-making equipment in it as well as some crackers; behind me, there’s a TV, an electric kettle, a mini-fridge, stationery, and postcards - the kind of thing I haven’t really seen in hotel rooms since my childhood. There’s also a proper tokonoma in the main room, with fresh flowers and some beautiful calligraphy. The toilet room is small, but the toilet seat lid automatically rises when you enter it. And finally, the bathroom, well, it’s got an enormous copper sink as well as special toiletries for men and/or women - and the bath itself also overlooks the Pacific & it’s very traditional, with a stool to sit on while you wash yourself & a large stone bath waiting to be filled with hot water before you soak. In short, this is an absurdly luxurious hotel; I had been curious about it since stumbling across it while researching this trip. It’s a beautiful spot, but it’s rural as hell & it’s hard to imagine anyone making this trek just to stay here. The town it’s in is known as the best bonito fishery on the island; I walked through the tiny market on the way here and it was jam-packed on a Thursday at mid-day. The michi-no-eki (roadside station, think something like a place you can stop with the family, give the dogs a break, and eat local food and shop for souvenirs on a road trip) down the hill from here was similarly hopping; it is after all the start of Golden Week, so the Japanese are all embarking on the busiest travel week of the year right about now.
However, walking up the (steep) hill to the hotel was kind of funny - was it even open? It looked practically abandoned, and re-reading the email I’d received from them didn’t make it clear they’d accepted my reservation, only that they’d received it. Huh. Well, might as well walk on it, so I did, and with some Google Translate voice-to-text in play, yes, they had a reservation and this beautiful room for me, even if the entire hotel appeared to be completely deserted. Surprise, it’s Thursday, which is the restaurant’s day off, which must be why it looks so dead. There was one other man (guest?) in the onsen, which was small but fine; it’s not every day I have an entire outdoor heated-seawater pool to myself! I took my sweet time enjoying that, then settled into a janky massage chair to enjoy some strawberry milk. And after that, back upstairs to write this.
Dinner and breakfast are included in the room rate; I’m expecting seafood (there had better be some bonito!) and such, but we’ll see! If anything, this will be the second-most expensive stay of my trip (and only one of two to break the US $125 a night barrier). But let me rewind to this morning…
The Business Hotel Marutomi was fab in terms of providing a good night’s sleep; I slept in and raided the snack bag for breakfast, choosing some kind of weird crackers-with-filling thing that apparently was going to help me poop better, or something. (Google Translate is not always reliable.) That was fine, but with no hotel breakfast on offer, well, might as well pack up and leave, which I did. I opted to wear the new Asics 32 4E sneakers today - hm. Verdict: just too damn big and I really missed having a less flexible sole. I’m going to stick with the Salomon 32 regulars from here on out; they’re not ideal (not quite wide enough, not cushy enough) but they’re adequate and I’ll be home early next month, anyhow.
Within a few minutes of leaving the hotel, I had crossed a low bridge and was standing outside of a store that sold rolled-egg (i.e., omelet) bento and the like - how could I resist? I’m that guy that thinks tamago sushi is delicious, after all. There’s something different about egg here that I love, so yeah, 2nd breakfast was going to be some omelet and a bottle of iced caffe latte. I paid and left & sat down on some stairs a little further up the road; just as I sat down, a fluffy white cat crossed the road behind me and ignored the egg I threw at it. Ah well. Some good news from home: an old friend and a remarkable fella was sitting at my kitchen table waiting the last 22 minutes before moving into his new home a couple of blocks over, which was wonderful to hear.
Once breakfast was done, well, time to hit the road. Given that there really isn’t a single canonical trail to follow, I often have to make decisions based on the English-language “Shikoku Japan 88 Route Guide” book published locally, an app called “Henro Helper” that I think might be made by a British person, and random gossip from a Facebook group and fellow pilgrims. I’m also slowly understanding the subtleties of the maps: is that a road? paved street of some kind? dirt trail? something else? And with all of that information there’s still one basic question: what kind of a hike do I want to hike? For me, I think the answer’s relatively straightforward: if it’s a dirt trail in a forest, fantastic; if it’s walking alongside a highway on a narrow shoulder, no thanks. And if there’s a choice between longer/shorter and steeper/easier, I find myself more and more thinking steeper is more interesting, if only because it means it’s more likely that I’ll be on my own and not crowded out by bikers, etc.
The first bit was up and over a pass between Tosa-Shinjo railway station and Awa station, both of which were just about at the coast, and which aren’t really all that far apart. The two options were straightforward: old road or new road (but not new-new road because you can’t walk along the expressway and it bypasses Awa entirely). Easy enough: old road, which took a bit longer but also meant no walking through 625 meters of tunnel next to heavy traffic. At first it felt like I wasn’t going to encounter anyone at all, but eventually there were groves of what looked like magnolias, possibly? The locals had meticulously tied tiny paper bags over the ends of all of the branches & there were tiny metal tracks everywhere, presumably to move harvest equipment around more easily. It really is fascinating to me how much infrastructure there is in our world that you really don’t ever see unless you’re out walking in the middle of nowhere…
Eventually, the old road joined the new road briefly, but I veered off again to go past a few oddities: something that looked very much like a love motel, another old motel that I think might have been turned into a private residence, and some kind of bizarro circular villain’s lair type thing at the top of a bluff, well hidden from view from most angles. Curious! And then down to Awa station, which offered a nice place to sit, a clean toilet, and a lot of peace and solitude; I watched the waves break just before the beach and drank some tea until I felt like continuing.
I knew that the next bit involved a steep climb up to Yakezaka-toge pass; I had really wanted to walk the coast road instead, but it’s been closed for a while due to landslides, so up I went. No one anywhere to be seen, just a caterpillar on my forearm at one point & a what I assume was a deer running away at high speed on the other side of the pass. It was steep, but only going up, with lots of steps; going down was thankfully gentler, but still tricky thanks to suboptimal footwear, LOL. But wow, what a beautiful day: no bugs, no rain, cool temperatures, enough sun to see clearly. Eventually, the trail left the forest a bit (nice view of the new motorway to the right) and ducked back in for a bit (nice view of the relatively old train line) before spitting me out on the old road into the next town (almost no traffic). And for a minute or so there I had a weird feeling that essentially amounted to oh, so this is what they must mean by enlightenment. Just a subtle, ineffable state of being for just a little bit where I felt like I was not my body, but something other; something at peace and at ease with the transience of its existence. I never thought I’d feel that way - it’s happened maybe once before - and wow, what a lovely thing to feel. The longer I spend walking by myself, the harder I push my body, and the less I speak or write, the easier it seems to be to feel that feeling.
Anyhow! Nakatosa is a small fishing village - okay, a little bit bigger than small - and I wasn’t hungry for lunch, so I was a little bit sad to pass a really good looking ramen shop as well as the cute little market in the center of town with all manner of shops selling good-looking food. I was more keen to get to the hotel because I wasn’t 100% sure I had a reservation; if I didn’t, I did check my phone, though, and there were other, good hotel options an hour or so away on the train, so I knew it was going to be fine regardless of what happened. I stopped at the beach for a bit to drink some more barley tea (it comes in huge 2 liter bottles for a buck and tastes good regardless of temperature and has no caffeine; I’m a fan) and catch my breath. Then, one last push over to the roadside station - I stopped again to use the john and ate a strawberry daifuku thing, yum (they seem to be very into strawberries in this town; they were even selling strawberry-flavored beer) - and then boom, a couple hundred steps upwards and I was on my way into checking in to this ridiculously nice hotel room.
Dinner isn’t for another half an hour; I don’t know, but I think I might pop down earlier to gauge the whole yukata-wearing situation beforehand. And if you’re curious what I look like right this second, well, here you go:
Thankfully, the hotel staff found me an XL yukata, but given that I’m in my own room right now, yeah, I haven’t done it up correctly. Sorry not sorry. Oh, and that’s a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 there, which charges off the same charger as my iPhone and which has been pretty much bulletproof so far. Not pictured: a successful Japanese diaper rash ointment application, which meant I made it through the day without any sort of junk-related issues. In fact, today might well have been the first day with no issues whatsoever: no pain, no Leukotape, no blisters, no ibuprofen, no chafing, no injuries. Let’s hope that stays the same for a while.
Okey doke - time to scout the dining room and get ready to eat something. Thanks for reading!