Day 27: Zero (Nakamura)
Welp, that storm didn’t quite happen, as it turns out. There was some very light rain in the morning and there’s some now as well, in the evening, but it was never enough to so much than turn the skies a moderately depressing, Pacific Northwest-style grey. I was somewhat disappointed by this, thinking “but no, I missed out on about 50 km of the pilgrimage route!” but then reminded myself that no, I had seen much of that route from the bus yesterday and it looked like severely un-fun walking. Speaking of the bus, as luck would have it I found out about a daily tourist bus that happens here that would’ve cost the same as yesterday’s public transit and would’ve taken me not only to the temple with enough time to recite sutras and get a stamp, but also would’ve taken me to a number of other interesting places and would’ve filled the entire day’s schedule nicely. Of course, there aren’t any English-language materials that talk about that bus, so nope, didn’t happen today (and really didn’t need to’ve have given that I already went to that temple yesterday). Even so, I think that one goes in to my eventual book on how to make a proper walking vacation out of the Shikoku 88 pilgrimage and avoid all of the tedious road-walking bits…
Last night’s dinner at the New Royal Hotel Shimanto was surprisingly delicious, unexpectedly so. This hotel room runs about US $70 a night, but that includes breakfast and dinner; I was allowed to choose from about a dozen different dinner options last night, all of which looked good, so I went with something I would never ordinarily order, karaage, aka JFC, Japanese fried chicken. I probably should’ve ordered one of the two things I didn’t recognize on the menu, but no worries, there was a lot of fried chicken and it was really good. Afterwards, I headed around the corner to the Lawson convenience store to buy dessert and a Suntory highball & wound up chatting briefly to the bikers I’d seen earlier in the day at the temple - one had a BMW and one had a Harley and they assumed I was German because I said a rode a BMW. (I don’t. Dan does, but you know, language barriers are tricky.)
Breakfast turned out to be a very well-stocked buffet, but I could swear I’m starting to run into some aging-related mechanical issues, even at 55. I first learned how to use chopsticks when I was a little kid - it’s so long ago I can never remember not knowing how to use them - but today I just couldn’t get them working correctly and wound up making a mess of things. Awkward!
I headed back upstairs to decide what to do with my day; I’d spotted a temple a few k outside of town called Ishimi-ji and decided that that’d make a fine short walk for the day. Given that it had been raining on and off, I took a rain jacket just in case - but I should’ve taken hiking poles as well as the rain had slicked the trails up there something fierce; I was able to visit the temple itself, but heading up to the mountain summit behind it to view all 88 statues that made a sort-of miniature 88 temple pilgrimage along the way was out of the question as it was just too slippery. (The mini-88 pilgrimage is vaguely like a Stations of the Cross type deal; there are a number of those around and I suppose you could walk them as a substitute for the real deal if you want to. I was hoping for cool, Legoland-like reproductions of all of the temples, but no, they’re just small carved statues meant to represent the temples. I think there are better/more elaborate ones, e.g., outside of Kyoto, but this was very simple.) I’d love to do this again, but in better weather, especially as the view from the summit is said to reach out to the Pacific.
From there, what next? Well, might as well go look at the train station, which was probably four k back into town. I made a mistake and wandered into the train yard instead where I was greeted by a very smiley railway employee gesturing for me to please GTFO in a very respectful manner - oops. The station was easy to find, though, and it had some exceptionally fine signage. In a sense, this is the about the end of the line-iest that it gets in Japan; there is one station further away, in a town a third the size of Nakamura, but this is the farthest-away station with a train to Okayama, for example, a station on Honshu, the main island, with a shinkansen connection to Tokyo.
There was even a hipster-esque coffee bar in the station. In fact, the weird thing about walking around Nakamura today was that unlike, say, Kochi or Tokushima, this place almost feels cool. There’s very little to see or do here, but the town felt lively, with plenty of locals in run-down restaurants, nicely appointed food halls, and such; on the whole, it’s still the back of beyond, but at least it has some kind of local flavor to it!
Sadly, the one local coffee roastery was closed today (but it looked amazing), so there wasn’t really much to do other than head back to the hotel, buy an extremely limited edition T-shirt from Montbell (they have what I assume is the smallest of all of their shops in a corner of the hotel lobby here), and rethink/replan the trip left to go. Four weeks have now elapsed since I left home; that leaves five weeks to go. Tomorrow’s a short-ish day that I hope has only good trails; beyond that, it looks like I’ve got things pretty well managed. So, not much to do there either! I then tried finding hiking shoe bargains back home in the States… but it looks like those have all disappeared, probably something to do with new tariffs spoiling the party given that all of the boots I’ve ever bought have been imported, usually from Asia. This is exceptionally frustrating given my weird shoe size (it’s nearly impossible to find in Europe or Asia, so if I can’t get it in the USA, well…)
So, that’s it for today. I’m packed for tomorrow & dinner’s in ten minutes or so.
Random notes: Just as in Tokushima, there’s a covered street here that must have been a bangin’ shopping street back in the day. Today, though, there’s not much there other than the Lawson I keep going back to for dessert and drinks. There are a couple of very old-school Japanese kissatens, or coffee shops - these were a thing in the 1950s and a few of them are hanging on even today. Sadly, the one pictured below closed too early for me to try lunch there.
The one halfway down the block definitely didn’t look like it was a going concern in 2025, but damn, what a beautiful sign:
And that’s all I’ve got for now. Suppertime!