May 10, 2025

Day 31: T40-Tsushima

Before I begin - and I’m going to be honest here, you might want to skip this entry if you’re squeamish - I’d like to take a moment and recommend one of my favorite authors to you: Luca Turin. As an example:

My trips to the USSR used to be a form of time travel, and I remember well the 1950s-grade soap powder which spread the dirt on clothes to an even grey cast instead of removing it, and left a faint smell of refrigerated Brie.

This is from a recent post of his in which he talks about a recently invented P&G product: Downy brand ‘scent beads’ - that’s something I’ll never buy because I like my wash to have no perfume, but Turin, author of Parfums: le guide, is of course a subject matter expert when it comes to such matters. And Turin came to mind early on today because some perfumes have a very small amount of indoles, which are the primary odorants that contribute to, well, the smell of shit. Skatole, in particular, is the guilty party here. If yesterday was the best-smelling day of the trip so far, largely because I was walking through citrus groves with hundreds of flowers, then today was the worst, because I shit myself.

One of the downsides of not having a gallbladder is that every once in a while my body will seize up and expel whatever it can from my lower intestine, usually quickly, without much warning, and accompanied by a lot of cramping. I’m not sure why, but that’s been happening pretty much every single morning since I got to Japan, but I’ve been able to anticipate it and head it off at the pass… until today. I had planned on heading straight to breakfast at Joyfull and hanging around there long enough to use their washroom, but when I got there this morning, they weren’t open yet - and I let my hunger get the better of me and wound up at a FamilyMart instead. I had a caffe latte and a couple packs of pancakes with margarine and maple - bad, bad, bad idea. Ten minutes after leaving, I could feel things going south - and there was absolutely nowhere I could relieve myself, and then suddenly: boom. So unpleasant. And of course, what then? Imagine you’re on a busy road, walking, and then that happens. For lack of a better idea, I ducked behind a culvert, dropped trou, and tried to get rid of the rest of it - but then I was stuck. Nowhere to change clothes, nowhere to wash up. My dry shorts suddenly weren’t, so chafing started up again shortly afterwards. And of course, well, it did not smell pleasant. No way was I going to get on a bus and subject other passengers to that, so I had to walk; if I was lucky, I could maybe find a bathroom somewhere to clean up… I even detoured a mile to what looked like a surfers’ beach just to use the showers there, only to find that the local council had turned them off because it wasn’t surfing season yet. (At least the taps were working so I could finally wash my hands.)

With that out of the way, it’d be nice to talk about something else, wouldn’t you think? So please allow me to do that instead: I slept well, I didn’t have to take a leak until the morning, so I was able to navigate the low-ceilinged Habitrail of the ryokan without injuring myself, although I did startle a Japanese guest who wasn’t expecting to see a giant in the hallway there. As I was leaving, the two Frenchmen I had met briefly yesterday were as well - and nope, not the guys I thought they were, and one of them wasn’t even French, but a Francophone Spaniard.

Today was going to be a long day, but I underestimated the difficulty of it and then some. About a third of the way into it, I came to a small town on the coast with a Lawson convenience store thankfully equipped with a private bathroom and a sink with lots of good quality hand soap, so I was able to at least feel slightly less horrible. I bought an iced tea and a croquette, and pondered my options. If I took the ‘shortcut’ (actually 2 km longer) along the coast (not much elevation gain due to two tunnels), then I could get to an onsen in another hour or so, where I might be able to clean myself up further. Or, well, I could just stay the hell away from other people and take the old henro trail, which had a 600 meter or so climb up to a pass, so a lot more work, but… I figured I was here to walk the pilgrimage, not make it as easy on myself at every possible juncture, so I did just that.

It had stopped raining just before I started walking, but that sure didn’t mean it was dry. It was warm, very humid, and uphill walking meant I sweated a lot as well, so no way was anything going to dry out any time soon. I adjusted my boxer briefs and my shorts as best as I could to minimize chafing and just took my time crawling up that hill. Surprisingly (to me), there was a lot of construction work here and there as the government is busy extending the expressway all the way to Sukumo (I’m guessing); this was a little bit sad in that it’d drastically change the experience of walking the trail (very quiet, no sign of any human stuff save for the occasional distant glimpse of a windmill) by having a huge, noisy expressway just off to the east from there. Also surprising were the large number of signs - I assume that they’d taken a lot of trouble to refurbished this trail sometime in, oh, the 1980s or 1990s, & they’d put up a dozen or two panels explaining things (in Japanese only, alas, so I don’t know what was going on). The trail kept going up; eventually, it crossed a small road at a sunny spot with a bench, so I drank all of my water before continuing upwards, and then finally it just kinda nonchalantly arrived at a spectacularly beautiful spot:

That’s a peninsula, by the way, all of it - there are some incredibly cool geographical oddities in this corner of Shikoku. After a few minutes here, I felt a need to keep going because, well, I was very keen to get to my lodgings tonight so that I could have a bath and do some laundry. (Thankfully, I’d booked a self-catering house tonight so I knew I’d be far away from other people.) Before I did, though, I spent a couple of minutes trying to get a picture of a butterfly…

Seriously, that’s pretty much impossible for me, to get a good picture of anything that’s moving. The tiniest wildlife sighting of the trip happened later on - something like a miniscule caterpillar exploring the tip of my shoe, but that only came out decently as a video, which I can’t share here.

The mountain trail seemed to keep going and going; eventually, of course, it met an actual road with a huge sign that said, I believe, WEIRD-ASS CAMELLIA TURN LEFT 150 METERS. I did in fact turn left & I walked about 250 meters, but I don’t think I saw anything remotely camellia-esque, much less weird and/or worthy of having been designed a Tsuhima Town Natural Monument. So disappointing! But eventually, finally, there was vending machine - man, I was thirsty at this point! - next to a replica of the Manneken-Pis, because why not, right? And from there, oh man, only another couple of hours… another hour later, the local government building had a nice shady bench, free Wi-Fi, and another vending machine, so I sat down for a bit, enjoyed a cool drink and a snack, and eventually got ready for that final hour’s walk into town.

Thankfully, that went fairly quickly. 28 kilometers today, or a little more than 17 miles; I was pretty exhausted, but very happy to find my little house perched next to a rice paddy a block from a discount supermarket ready and waiting for me, with check-in via phone so I didn’t have to embarrass myself by checking in looking like the weary, smelly hiker that I was today. Within seconds of figuring out the lock, I was filling the bathtub while figuring out how the washing machine worked; by nightfall, I had clean clothes again and every last indole had been banished from my life, at least for now, replaced by a somewhat odd-smelling Japanese laundry detergent that vaguely reminds me of those old musty shops in Japantown, San José, that sell bric-a-brac from the old country like sake cup sets, fans, and shoehorns. The crickets are out in force tonight, any traffic noise is thankfully constrained by the tunnel the motorway’s in in the mountain behind me, and I’ve got a highball and some discount cold okonomiyaki in front of me. All in all, a good day - especially now that it’s over.

Bonus stuff: I really am surprised at the apparent lack of pilgrims - this is the prime time of year to do this & yet there don’t seem to be many at all. I saw one pilgrim today, full stop, a young Japanese man who’s walking the whole thing. Almost everyone else I’ve seen or met has been either on a bus tour (the usual way to do it) or just kind of doing it haphazardly, taking a lot of public transit, as part of a motorcycle tour, or meeting friendly locals with cars who are happy to speed it up for them if they can. Not a complaint, mind you! Today especially, though, it seems like a lot of folks are missing out by skipping some of the harder bits. (I’m still sticking by my guns that if you’re going to skip parts of this, you should skip the road-walk bits that are just annoying.)

It’s been a long time since I was a Microsoft employee, but I really would love to have turned today’s mishap into an interview question - I think it’d be a fascinating one, albeit totally uncool from an HR perspective for obvious reasons!

Turns out the mystery camellia is in fact likely there, but the sign is missing the graffiti that explains where it is! Thanks, Google Image Search, for figuring that one out for me…

I didn’t manage to get any great pics of the huge motorway construction sites, alas, but this one almost kinda works, especially if you’re a 2001 fan: