Day 25: Ariigawa-Shimoda
I can be a little bit of a traditionalist about some things; one of those is food. Many years ago, I was finally able to score a reservation for the High Sierra Camps in Yosemite; on the very last night of that trail, the camp chef (at Vogelsang, I think it was) cheerily announced that tonight’s meal was going to be… Thai curry. That pissed me off: I love Thai curry, but the last thing I want after a hard day’s hiking in the Sierra Nevada is Thai curry. It’s like checking in to a hotel in Bangkok and being offered sauerbraten for dinner - just plain wrong. American food would’ve been just fine, thanks! And last night’s minshuku was annoying in a couple of ways: one, depending on where and how you book it, it’s either 7,000 yen a night or 12,500 yen a night, which is how much I paid. That’s a huge price difference depending on whether or not you’re willing to only book 48 hours in advance - and it was barely worth 7,000 yen, much less 12,500. No yukata available, no hot bath available, none of the usual standards applied. Instead, you got cutesy hand-drawn stuff saying ‘welcome pilrgrims!!!’ while admonishing you to turn off the light if you weren’t using it. Dinner was at least hearty, but oh man, it was also wacky in a borderline annoying way. Rice wasn’t served in a bowl, but as a quasi-timbale with a cold fried egg on top of it. There was a small dish of what I think was a Thai red curry (hence my flashback to Yosemite), plus a salad, something that vaguely resembled mapo tofu, and random other stuff. At least the beer was cheap and cold. I would’ve slept better, but the door didn’t seal out all of the light - and one of the other guests decided that 9 pm would be a fantastic time to blow-dry her hair at great length. Lovely.
Breakfast was similarly wackadoodle, with a tiny bottle of fermented apple juice lactic acid drink, no tea, rice (but no seaweed), and at some point I just gave up and decided that okay, this place sucks, time to get out of here and go. I left early, and given that I was going to be walking along that busy highway for the first couple of hours, I made the rare decision to wear noise-cancelling earbuds and listen to something… but what? Oh, I know: the 1985/86 B-52’s album Bouncing Off The Satellites, which I heard in high school and which I hated so much that I stopped listening to their music for decades. When I was much younger, one of my favorite Christmas presents ever was a JC Penney cassette player with a tape of Wild Planet; I used to love that band, but that album sucked so bad that it was one and done for me, just instant fan death on my part. Would it sound any better to me 40 years after it was recorded? I pressed play and… oh fuck no, this is still terrible. Yes, I’m aware that their guitarist was dying of AIDS when he recorded it shortly before his death… but that’s no excuse. Sometimes you get Derek Jarman’s BLUE, sometimes you get Bouncing Off The Satellites. I could hear seconds go by, wondering what the hell was going on - just empty space, devoid of interest, pleasure, anything at all, gunked up with unnecessary Fairlight CMI, terrible drum programming, and even a John Coté track without any of the band on it (save for Fred being ooooh political about the fucking rainforest. Fred, save it, okay? If I wanted to hear pop stars sing political songs, trust me, it isn’t you I wanna hear.) So terrible, so unnecessary, so… void.
Finally, I got to a stretch of trail that wasn’t right next to the highway, but along a beach for a couple of kilometers. That was better; out went the earbuds and I listened to the real world again for a while. Things were absolutely mobbed today; that stretch went through a huge city park filled with families and friends out enjoying the stunning weather, surfing and swimming and eating and drinking…
Eventually, there was some sort of enormous local art museum exhibit going on on the beach, with hundreds of different white T-shirts hung on display-clotheslines. There were also dozens of tents with food, drink, souvenirs, crafts, you name it; the one massage tent was sadly unstaffed so I just kept going. Eventually, the park came to an end; I stopped for a can of milk tea and figured out where to go next. This wasn’t a long day; maybe 20 k total, and I was halfway done; I couldn’t decide between doing one of two detours (the longer one had a restaurant, the shorter one a convenience store), so decided just to keep it simple and take the most direct route. The first bit was again along a busy road, so in went the earbuds, this time for Cornelius’s Mellow Waves, thinking that some actually-Japanese music might be good. And it was; the first couple of seconds of that album seemed to evince more care and composition than all of that B-52’s album. The road quieted down quickly, though, so just three songs from that album, thank you. (As a general rule, I don’t like to walk with earphones in unless it’s around my neighborhood; part of the pleasure of walking is hearing new things. Plus, like, traffic, right? Probably better if you can hear trucks creeping up on you…)
The walk wasn’t super interesting; it kept going up and around from cove to cove along the coastline, with little variance. These coves (for lack of a better word) typically had jam-packed surfing beaches in them; towards the end of the day, things opened out into another enormous city park, dotted with car-camping parks, stargazing platforms, art, you name it (and my hot springs hotel somewhere in there too). Walking through the middle of another tiny village, though, the air raid sirens (?) fired up at 12h25 sharp - followed by someone actually talking and not a recording. Uh. I don’t understand Japanese, but that’s not a good sign; I turned around and sure enough, you could see dark smoke in the air rising from maybe a kilometer way, I’m guessing from near the café I’d passed maybe fifteen minutes earlier. Not good!
Given my early departure and lack of anywhere to stop for lunch, I managed to get to my hotel super-early, before 14h00. I managed to check in easily (yay!) and hung my sweaty clothes out to dry and went down for a nap. There’s an onsen here but it’s public, so jam-packed due to today being a holiday; I might go after dinner when it’s guests only, or early tomorrow morning before breakfast, but no way am I going to deal with that madness just now.
Tonight’s dinner is up in one hour; I’m famished. Tomorrow’s a near-zero day, just 8 km walk to get back in to the city center just to the west; it’ll probably be too early to check into my hotel room there, but you never know! The weather forecast is telling me I should try to get to the next temple tomorrow as well, but it’s a 100-minute bus ride each way and I don’t care to schlep the big backpack down there, so I’m going to wait another day. Even if it’s a rainy day, I do have a new dry bag so my stamp book will be hopefully well protected…
Random notes: Ran into another European hiker today wearing short shorts. Like, visible thigh gap on full display short. I’ve seen Westerners, both men and women, wearing shorts like that here and… I don’t know. I’m a little prudish, I guess; why not keep it in line with local standards and wear something with a little more fabric?
Today’s animal sightings: a dead badger, a fat cat dozing under an umbrella, a crab scaling the side of a bridge, and utterly adorable doggos wearing matching ensembles. Awww!
Bonus pic: my favorite sign of the trip so far (and this hits different if you’ve worked in healthcare for at least part of your career):
