Day 39: T46-Dogō Onsen
The weather’s on everyone’s mind. Something seems to have changed; instead of sunny, warm days, days are now cloudy, but no warmer; it doesn’t seem quite warm enough to be muggy, but it’s definitely not cool enough to be refreshing. The forecasts for the next two weeks seem to be uncertain as to where things are going: will it rain? If so, how much and when? All of this concerns me of course because I have a ways to get yet; today was day 34 of (now) 51 total hiking days, which means there are only 17 days left - and I need to use my time as wisely as I can, maximizing joy hiking in the mountains and minimizing rain-related problems (chafing, stamp book damage) as best I can.
This morning seemed okay; I thought I was going to be early at breakfast at 06h30, but the breakfast hall was absolutely jammed with baseball camp kids, from early to late teens, plus some younger kids with their families. Once again, the food on offer at the inn seemed stingy; although last night had eel (only the 2nd time I’ve had eel this trip, and the first time there wasn’t an upcharge for it), there was very little of it and the rest of the dinner tray was meager. This morning, I was looking forward to my raw egg and rice, but they had boiled my egg for me because, well, Westerners don’t like raw eggs. Heh. But there just wasn’t much else to eat: rice, nori, one hard-boiled egg, miso soup, tea. On the bright side of course: not eating very much means running less of a risk of gallbladder-related dietary mishaps. Yay?
There was no reason to be in a hurry to leave, but I did want to get back across the street and revisit the tree Kukai is said to have planted and take a few pictures. The next temple was less than a mile away; that one was weirdly meh & I’ll likely remember it most for having bought and drank a bottle of Evian there, wondering why the hell you would transport mineral water around the globe when, well, Japan has plenty of water as well… anyhow. A bit further on, there was a bekkaku temple that almost seemed abandoned; no one to be see, but one lit candle and one lit stick of incense meant that someone had been by already today. Off in the distance, I could make out Matsuyama castle as well as the Ferris wheel next door to my hotel from earlier in the week; that did feel good, seeing that I was walking back to the city that took well over an hour on the bus to leave.
I was definitely feeling more sluggish than usual: why? Poor sleep thanks to the neighbors watching TV last night? Not enough calories? No alcohol for a few days to see if that would help with my GI issues? Gen X ennui for no particular reason? No idea. Well, maybe caffeine will help? Sure, why not, let’s duck into a Family Mart to try some iced tea, this time Earl Grey with orange. (Verdict: still sluggish, not a fan of the orange addition.) OK, keep going, then. Oh, look, it’s another temple and this time it also feels inert, sterile; is there a reason there are so many temples in such close proximity to each other today & is it a coincidence that they’re all so bland?
Anyhow, nothing much to do other than to keep going. The walk itself was mostly harmless, all pavement and road walking, the only really bad bits being on old, degraded bitumen that felt like walking on sharp pebbles half-barefoot. Eventually, T49 happened, finally managing to upgrade the game a bit with some seriously intimidating statuary outside. Even so, it was getting close to 11h00 and I was still trudging along joylessly so… well, are there any restaurants nearby? I have plenty of time; killing an hour eating might work out well on several fronts, then, right? Sure enough, there was a good-looking soba restaurant across the street; I wouldn’t have known it was a restaurant without the Internet because I couldn’t read the sign. They’d just opened but were already filling up with patrons; they had a small downstairs area that was a perfect place for me to stash my pack and enjoy a calm, unhurried meal. I don’t often eat lunch when I’m traveling on my own; usually, it’s just a time and money sink that detracts from seeing sights, so why bother? Today, though, well - yup, good idea. I had a lunch set that was basically soba with a side of chirashizushi and mixed vegetable tempura, with a ginger ale for good measure. All of that came to US $11, which is what I pay for an average quick, shitty meal at Taco Bell back home, by the way; tasty food for cheap for the win. Somehow, I finally started feeling myself again; it must have been those sweet calories making their way into my system.
Only two more temples to go; T50 was decidedly bland, but at least there was a weirdly cheap vending machine soon afterwards where I bought a 500 mL Coke for only 120 yen. And then minutes after that, God damn it, my body decided it needed to find a toilet immediately. Thankfully, the Henro Helper app suggested one - but it turned out to involve wandering through a cemetery that felt a bit like a maze: would I find my way through it in time? Answer: yes. Of course, it was a small public playground with an ancient squat toilet, but I, pro that I am, positioned myself accurately this time and got that out of the way, thankfully. Sorry, kids playing outside: that probably sounded terrible. Ah well.
I had been kind of excited to visit T51, Ishite-ji, if only because it was said to be enormous, have a cave, a grilled-mochi stand, and so on. Well, uh, I did not enjoy it at all. Because it’s big and because it’s close in to the center of town, it also sees a number of tour groups, but not pilgrims, just ordinary tourists looking for something to see. Today, there was a large number of Spanish-speaking tourists there (I don’t speak Spanish well enough to guess what country they’re from) - and one woman in particular, with an overly surgically-modified face that looked like a Vienna sausage being smushed through a fishnet stocking, wearing a gold lamé low-cut top that displayed her not-recently-augmented, now-suggestive-of-continental-drift boobs in a truly trashy manner, saw me, whipped out her phone, and proceeded to take video and/or picture of me walking in in my pilgrimage gear, washing my hands, ringing the temple bell - and I’d had enough. Hey. Don’t do that. “Oh I don’t speak English.” Uh-huh. My Spanish is bad, so what I said basically amounted to “This is a church. Not a tourist place. Don’t take pictures of me” or at least I hope it did. That left a bad taste in my mouth, as did the rest of the temple; here’s their “stunning 3-story pagoda” for example:
The “cave” turned out to be a long tunnel with a low ceiling that smelled like farts; the only cool thing was an amphibian of some kind making appropriately atmospheric sounds like a fucked up Kitaro record. The grilled mochi stand was nowhere to be found; instead, there were a couple of ramshackle vendor stalls selling, uh, fans? No idea why. Do tourists buy that stuff? Anyhow, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Yeccch.
At least that was right around the corner from Dogo, the spa town // leisure district of Matsuyama that’s connected to the center of town by an Iyutetsu tram. I went to check in to my ryokan and was denied - too early, only 2 pm - but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it gave me time to see things I wouldn’t have otherwise, like an elaborate clock that Does Stuff twice and hour - and the third and final run of the Botchan Train, which I happily signed up for. I’m still not sure about why that’s a thing, but I gather there was a popular novel a hundred years ago that lovingly mocked the tiny trains that were in use back then to take folks from the port up through the city to Dogo (the clock apparently recreates scenes from that book as well). So, an old book, an old story, and a fake-ish old train that followed a streetcar back to the center of town at only six times the usual price. However, it came with a friendly conductor who told stories (I imagine) along the way, so it did have a certain charm to it.
While waiting for the tiny train to depart, I noticed that there was a “hand bath” maybe 20 meters away, so I tried that out: nope, didn’t fix the hand either. But I did realize that my phone battery was almost dead, so I jogged back to the inn to fetch my external battery; they’d already put my pack in my room, which looked fantastic, so I quickly completed the registration paperwork before running back to the tram station to join right on time.
I had thought the train was going to the same station my hotel was at, but it stopped a bit short from there, exactly at the McDonald’s I’d had a Grimace shake at two days earlier. So why not do it again? It was tasty and only a dollar or so…
Best of all? As I was going upstairs to throw out my empty shake cup (no trash cans on the ground floor), two kids saw me and started grinning ear to ear, seeing that I was enjoying a Grimace Shake as well. They tipped their cups in the international sign of “cheers”, we toasted each other, I roared KANPAI!, they started laughing, and all was right with the world for a moment.
From there, back to the hotel, take a bath, get ready for dinner, a kaiseki style dinner that was moderately good, not amazing. I spent much of it picking off all of the meat from an enormous fish head in a shallow broth bowl: not my favorite pastime, but it did taste pretty good. And that’s it for the night; I have private use of one of the baths in the hotel at 21h00 tonight, but I think I’d rather sleep as the men’s bath was pretty poky, if nice and warm - I don’t need round 2, I don’t think.
Random notes: T45 is the second passive-aggressive temple of the trip for me. After a monk stamps your receipt book and calligraphs it (is that even a verb?), they’ll typically use some old newspaper or blotting paper that’s already in your book to prevent the ink from smudging. T45, on the other hand, had custom-printed English-language blotting-paper inserts on hand that I’d initially thought was charming - it seemed like an innocuous story about how nature is awesome blah blah blah… but then I read the entire page, and at the end of it they basically said “look, asshole, you think the writing and stamps are artwork and YOU’RE WRONG, our abbot is going to offer your devout prayers to the gods” and yeah I didn’t need to read any further. It’s a weird situation for sure; it’s a weird grey area of goods-for-services (500 yen gets you the three stamps and some calligraphy; that money obviously keeps these temples going), but also a religious service that I’m fairly certain a number of visitors, not just foreign, either do not take seriously, do not understand, or are uninterested in. Me, I understand it a little bit, I do take it as seriously as I’m able to, and I’m also not devoutly offering prayers to T45’s deity. It vaguely reminds me of the traditional custodians of Uluru putting up signs asking you not to climb (back when they still allowed it) and then charging you four times the usual campground fees to sleep there - it’s tough when you rely on that income stream and the people that bring it also behave in ways that don’t really jibe with your core values.
Because of cultural taboos against walking and drinking, every time you buy a drink from a vending machine, you’re basically stuck standing there drinking it until you’ve finished and can leave it in the recycle bin next to the machine. This is a real bummer: I don’t like just standing around, but I do need to rehydrate; doing so quickly isn’t refreshing, it’s just work. I vaguely wonder if there’s a more general cultural injunction against context switching: you should do one thing, and only one thing, before continuing on with the other thing…
I’m fairly certain I hit triple digits of things I’ve hit my head on today. Go me! Once again, the inn I’m staying in is filled with obstacles I’m not navigating correctly. This is a far more modern ryokan than most, and somewhat luxurious, but in keeping with traditional style and proportions, it’s really not for anyone taller than, oh, 170 cm or so. Ouch.
I also feel like I’ve basically hit the limits of what Japanese food can do, generally (and reductively) speaking. It’s been six weeks now, give or take, and I feel like I’m familiar with all of the base notes, all of the general building blocks of this food. Sadly, this means that the novelty has worn off a bit as well. I am slowly starting to miss some basic (for me) things like spicy food, builder’s tea, muesli - yes, I’m happy to have another breakfast of rice, egg, soup, seaweed, tea, and pickles - but I’m also looking forward to France later this summer. Damn it, I really miss good bread.