Day 26: Shimoda-Nakamura
For the past couple of days, the weather app on my iPhone - oh wait, one sec, my Apple Watch is vibrating, there’s a Rain Soon alert happening. Heh. Yes, there’s a storm blowing in from China and it’s supposed to start raining at about 18h00 local time. I’ve been aware of this for a couple of days now, so took the time to rebook things a bit to avoid the big storm tomorrow, Tuesday, May 6. I had originally planned to leave my hotel this morning and walk nearly 30 kilometers to a very basic hotel in the town of Tosashimizu, walk another 25+ kilometers on Tuesday to visit T38, Kongōfuku-ji, at the very tip of Cape Ashizuri, stay at the hotel another night, and then do another 25+ k walk to the village of Mihara. This… did not sound in any way appealing given the incoming storm, especially because that hotel looked pretty dire, in the middle of nowhere with a sketchy Chinese restaurant next door. Instead, I rebooked into an old, one-fancy, now-almost-kitschy hotel in the town of Nakamura, which is a big enough town to have a railway station as well as two rail lines that connect it to a smaller town on the west coast as well as Kochi, the capital of the prefecture.
Last night’s dinner at the most expensive hotel I’ll stay at on this trip was woefully subpar, alas. It was one of those experiences where you find yourself wondering if you shouldn’t just have walked into Nakamura instead of walking a little further to stay at an onsen (yes, Chris, you should have). The food was okay, there wasn’t very much of it, and I had to ring the service bell and deploy my humiliatingly bad Japanese language skills to ask where my tempura was (answer: oh shit, yeah, we’ll bring that right away). They never did bring any rice, though - and a Japanese meal with out rice is, well, I’m sure you’ve already finished this sentence in your own mind.
I was up early - thank you, mewling infant upstairs - so went to the hot springs at around 05h45 for a soak. Surprise, they sucked as well, with an overall vibe of neglected city park meets mold. Not that there was any actual mold, mind you! There were however half-assed printouts of signs saying ‘please close the doors because insects’ taped up at random and it was about as Zen as mistaking the urinals at your local Greyhound station for Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe. Not only that, but the first thing I saw when entering the men’s spa was a vagina - I was not expecting a dad to bring his young daughter in with him, but hey, if that’s how the locals roll… Anyhow, yeah, that wasn’t exactly a great morning at the baths, but at least I soaked my feet a bit and had time in the room to figure out a game plan for today.
Operating on the theory that the sooner done with the day, the better (because incoming storm), I decided to move breakfast to 07h00 (okay, they said, we can do that, it’ll only take 5 minutes to broil your fish) and get the hell out of there quickly, with about 5 km walking to a bus stop on the other side of the Shimanto River, the last undammed river in Japan. Breakfast was pretty good, save for the missing tea (c’mon, breakfast without tea in Japan is, uh, please refer to the sentence you constructed yourself previously). It was my first encounter with a raw egg, but I scrambled it with some shoyu and mixed it into my bowl of rice and I would’ve eaten it all if I hadn’t been scrambling to make that bus. The miso soup was especially good as it wasn’t really miso, but tasted more like clam broth or something far fishier, yum. And that fish they grilled? Yeah, that was awesome. Still, no seaweed strips for the rice, no tea, and overall it just felt like they didn’t give a shit, especially given the price, roughly triple what a normal place would’ve charged for one night, three meals. (US $210 last night; tonight’s hotel is $85, but most places outside of the big cities are charging around US $55 for one night, breakfast, and dinner.)
I took off quickly, but within a few minutes (damn it!) my body was telling me no, wait, you gotta find a toilet immediately. I’m still not sure if this is just Japanese food in general or if it’s the new normal after my gall bladder surgery three years ago; I don’t remember this happening on any of my most recent hiking trips (Germany/Austria 2024, France 2023, Switzerland 2022, etc.) so I’m guessing there’s something about these huge breakfasts that has powerful laxative effect, ugh. No problem, though, there was a dog park right there with a squat toilet (go me, I’m now really good as using those!), problem solved, hands washed, let’s not speak of that any more, and then I was busting my hump to make that 5 km to the bus stop happen within 60 minutes, which I did - 12 minutes per k isn’t at all bad, especially with a 10 kg pack on my back. No wonder I’m feeling better overall - when I sit down on one of those tiny plastic stools in a bathhouse to scrub myself, I can do it now without my belly getting in the way (unlike three weeks ago). The scale tells me I’m missing about ten pounds, but more importantly I feel like things are getting back to where I like them: a nice, properly bear-sized belly, but also some upper body strength thanks to hiking poles and (I assume) some serious leg muscles going on due to all the walking. I’m back in the 230’s at this point and it works for me; the 240’s are too much, anything under 220 or so isn’t bearish enough for my taste, but right about now I’m feeling good (and I think probably looking good, but I’ll have to get Dan’s judgment on that when I get home).
Soooo I made it to the bus stop not only on time, but with 20 plus minutes to spare, oops. It wasn’t a comfortable place to wait for a bus - just a sign next to a highway with no shoulder - but there looked to be another stop a bit further on, maybe one k, so I walked that, saw a nearby vending machine, treated myself to an iced latte, had a surreptitious pee in the bushes behind the bus stop, and waited a few minutes before boarding an entirely empty bus. Guess the early bird gets the worm as well as his choice of seats!
That bus runs every two hours or so from Nakamura station to T38 at the tip of the Ashizuri peninsula; this was the first of the day and it remained empty for almost the entire trip, picking up a couple of elderly passengers once we got into the town about 45 minutes before the temple who were headed home from the supermarket to their villages. Turns out it didn’t actually go all the way to the temple, but to a hotel about five minutes’ walk away; the locals had turned a huge parking lot into a shuttle bus staging area for all vehicular traffic, which was a little odd given that it was only a few minutes’ walk, almost entirely flat, to get to the temple from there (but people weren’t walking, they were taking shuttle buses). I said no thanks to the shuttle bus and got walking; there were some nice detours to take, like this…
It was a pleasant walk along the coastline with a lot of up and down; the weather was perfect, the views were incredible - in fact, it was kind of queasy-making looking out to sea because you could distinctly see the Earth’s curvature there. There were a lot of people around, mostly day-trippers, I’m guessing, and also a lot of weirdly empty, possibly abandoned or derelict hotels in the area - I suppose this was a busy tourist destination back before you could just fly somewhere more exotic, like Thailand. The first place that jumped to mind was Gori, Georgia; when I visited there a quarter-century ago, its hotels were all derelict because there was no longer a reason to go there (back in the say, Soviets would go there to see the Stalin museum, so they had big hotels, hostels, etc.). This felt like that - and when I finally, finally arrived at the temple after changing into pilgrim garb, it also felt tacky as hell, with someone selling 300-yen ice cream at the temple gates and lots of people milling about in T-shirts and shorts treating it more like a theme park than a place of worship. Even so: it was a beautifully designed space and I did enjoy seeing it.
Even though I’d dawdled as much as I could’ve, I would’ve been able to’ve caught a bus back to Nakamura immediately if they hadn’t moved the bus stop to the shuttle-bus parking lot - so I had to dawdle even more, then wait an hour plus for the next bus. I considered hiking some more, but it was clear that the original trails were mostly just gone these days & that any walking was going to be on narrow roads with bus and car traffic - no thanks. So bus it was, almost two hours back to Nakamura and then to my hotel, the New Royal Hotel Shimanto, which very much feels like it was built in the 1980s; it has a Grand Hotel feel, but in kind of a woefully outdated way. My room is as small as Japanese hotel rooms get, a little bit sad as we’re seriously in the middle of nowhere here and they could’ve been more generous with the space, but it’s clean if worn & there’s even a tiny Montbell shop in the lobby, go figure. I’ll be headed down to dinner shortly; interestingly, there’s a kaiseki restaurant across the street that speaks to the town’s history of being settled by outsiders from Kyoto way back when. I’d love to eat there tomorrow night, but I’ve already paid for supper here, so…
Random notes: This tiny Montbell has Nakamura-specific shirts for sale with a beautiful drawing of the Shimanto river on the back. I’ll probably have to buy one, damn it. And now I’m wondering if the Tokushima store also had special merch - the Kochi one did, but I didn’t love the colorways for that design enough to buy a shirt there.
Amazon came through with a cheap inflatable pillow that I picked up at a convenience store a block away, hooray! It ain’t much but it’ll definitely help at most of the places I’ll be staying.
On the bus back to Nakamura, two other bearded Westerners got aboard at two different stops. Been a while since I’ve seen anyone that looks vaguely like me!
Given that it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, I figured I should walk the 15 minutes over to the city castle, now reconstructed as a museum. They were wonderfully friendly there and even offered me free entry as I’m obviously over 65… I declined. But I did love the view from their roof!
This is what the inside of one of those hotels - this had someone raking leaves out front, but no lights on inside, no guests, and no staff. I did buy a badly freezer burned ice cream from their vending machine (bad idea):
