Day 48: Ikedacho Sano-Kan-onji
Tonight I’m sleeping in Kagawa prefecture for the first time; I’m in a lovely Japanese-style hotel room, 6 tatami mats in size, but with that extra bit in front of the windows with Western-style chairs and a lovely view of the sun setting over the Seto Inland Sea. It all feels a bit melancholy as it seems certain that the rainy season is about to start for good, a few weeks earlier than expected & bit of a damp squib as far as I’m concerned.
When I set my retirement date in the summer of 2024, my primary concern was staying employed long enough to max out my 401(k) contribution for the year & to make sure I was paid my yearly bonus. That happened; I delayed the start of this trip by a few weeks in hopes of attending Smokeout in Las Vegas, but they moved that date back a few weeks, not that it matters because I went to Western Xposure instead and had a hell of time. What that always meant, though, was that I would fly to Japan the Tuesday afterwards and start walking the day after. In theory, that should’ve been plenty of time to complete the walk before the summer rainy season hit, but this year that doesn’t appear to be the case.
But first, let me rewind a bit to yesterday, Monday morning. The longer I’m in Japan, the less I find myself enjoying Japanese breakfast food. What was a novelty seven weeks ago now feels slightly unappetizing, more so if natto is involved. At this point, I would absolutely kill for a mug of builder’s tea (as opposed to a tiny cup of green tea) and Bircher muesli - or, heck, eggs and toast would be nice too. The Super Hotel I stayed at in Shikokochuo wasn’t as groovy as the last once I stayed at; for some reason, my room didn’t have the usual built-in desk and workspace, just a weird giant fold-out single bed-mattress thing that took up space without being useful (for me). I didn’t even take a bath there; after the Pizza Hut grease bomb + French Capri-Sun style baggie of wine, all I felt like doing was sleeping, which I did incredibly well. Thank God for blackout shades and the Super Hotel pillow - man, I would buy one of those if they sold them! I filled my water bag at the water dispenser in the breakfast room & ate a few pastries with some coffee for breakfast; no rice, miso soup, etc. for me that morning. (That did seem to help with my digestive tract, thankfully!)
Today’s walk seemed fairly straightforward: get to the last temple in Ehime prefecture + then continue on to my lodgings for the night in preparation for the steep, difficult walk up to Unpen-ji, T66, which is the highest temple on the entire pilgrimage route. And it was in fact fairly straightforward; it had stopped raining, but not cleared up particularly, so it was cool and damp, but still a bit overcast; think June gloom or May grey and you’re basically there. Very San Diego!
What was fun today was that I could pick out the Super Hotel building from almost anywhere where there was a view back over the city - it always feels good to me to think, hmm, okay, so those are the enormous paper mill towers I walked past, that tiny thing in the distance is Kawanoe Castle, and okay, there’s the Super Hotel. You can barely see any of them in that picture, but that’s kind of the point!
I don’t have any great pictures of T65; it was a pleasant spot, though, spacious and calm. If the walk up there had been slightly better than average (roads with no drivers, some dirt for a little while), then that thankfully continued for a bit. It’s a bit of the ways to the minshuku where I was hoping to spend the night; the first third of it was along a small, paved road with absolutely no traffic, but with the occasional nice view back over the city of Shikokchuo to remind me of how far I’d come. Eventually, though, my luck ran out and it reverted to a more typical trail: along the side of a busy road with no sidewalk, just a narrow strip painted green in hopes of making pedestrians feel more secure. Not fun!
There was a tiny bekkaku temple along the way, cramped and unpleasant; I’m sure it looked better before modernization happened. That’s where the trail merged in to a proper highway (not dual carriageway or anything glam, just an actual highway and not a rural road), which of course made it way, way more annoying than previously. I slogged along that for quite some time before finally making it to a rest hut for pilgrims; I was tired, hungry, and wanted to stop, dry my socks, and eat something.
That’s where I looked at Bluesky on my phone and saw that Rene had won the IML title - woohoo! - and then I enjoyed a very pleasurable conversation with a friend back home in North America about, you know, stuff. I enjoyed my snacks and water, saw zero other pilgrims for the entire hour I was there - I guess it really is getting late in the season! - and then sucked it up and kept going after having a casual squiz at the visitors’ book - two Canadians had left behind a custom sticker showing cartoons of themselves as pilgrims, beseeching the reader to follow them on YouTube and Instagram (eww) + an Italian had written a lengthy “Dear LGBTQ+ people: You are not alone!” entry as well, both of which struck me as frankly kind of off. I mean, nice people I’m sure, but are religious pilgrimages the best place to ask strangers to like and subscribe to your socials?
Finally, the pilgrim trail allowed pilgrims to leave the highway, go up a dirt trail for a bit, and then join the old, pre-tunnel road that used to go across a pass to the next valley.
There were some cool old road signs at the top of the pass - and then it met up with the busy highway again shortly afterwards, sigh. Even so: not that bad, not that long. Amusingly, when the trail turned into the next village, the minshuku owner had essentially rearranged the signs to make sure everyone would stop by his business. Thankfully, there were no issues with my reservation, so I had a fairly decent room to myself in no time at all. This was as old-school as it gets - to the point where there was no heating or air conditioning, just a heat pump with no remote control on the wall. That wasn’t a problem until it got fairly cold in the small hours of the morning; worse yet, although the comforter was warm and heavy, it was entirely unsuitable for a tall guy such as myself, which meant I had a restless, cold, uncomfortable night… Dinner was totally okay, not amazing. There were four guests total; after dinner, the proprietor, who I imagine must’ve been in his late 70s or early 80s, handed out maps he’d drawn and copied and then held forth at great length in Japanese about how to walk tomorrow. Very… I wouldn’t say helpful… admirable, perhaps? I smiled and waited it out; I think he was maybe trying to point out a different way of going than the usual trail, but I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I had a printed map and GPS on my phone + that it was likely signed as well.
Another oddity of the guesthouse was that you were not allowed to choose your breakfast or dinner time - it just happened to be 6 for both times. At 05h50, the woman working there started banging on doors telling people to come and eat - not a problem as I’d barely slept. Breakfast was not particularly good, but I was able to get the other guests to laugh by making a show of not wanting to eat the natto they’d served me. (I don’t mind it as a sushi roll, but on its own… I should probably try it again, it’s been ages, but it doesn’t look appetizing.)
I checked my map for toilets ahead - none, absolutely none, for nearly 6 kilometers. Hm. Not good. And it was clear that the innkeeper expected us to leave shortly… what to do? I visited the toilet a couple of times to no avail, then figured I guess I should just hope for the best and get going.
Hope lasted about eleven fucking minutes before it died on me in a major way, God damn it. The less said about that the better; it was a low key irritant for the rest of the day.
The trail up was f’n steep - it just kept going up and up. I wasn’t prepared for how steep it was going to be; I could handle it okay aerobically, but I misjudged the incline and managed to, um, do interesting things to my calf muscles, which started feeling a lot of pain fairly early on. On the bright side, pun intended, the sun finally started to break through the clouds this morning - when I finally got to the top, an elevation gain of nearly 800 meters, the views were absolutely spectacular. I was speechless for a bit; I wasn’t expecting to feel such elation, but the whole Ishizuchi’s-not-there-man vibe from the past few days had got me down a bit.
On the whole, though, Temple 66 had kind of a weird vibe to it. They (I’m assuming) had put up dozens of perky, English language signs on the trails on both sides that said “You can do it!” (with quotes, even) that gave it kind of a gross, commercial feel. Throw in the surprising fact of a small ski area + an extensive amulet shop at the temple office and yeah, okay, not my thing. The layout was confusing as well; there’s a long ropeway down to the valley below + as is always the case, signage is directed at those tourists, not people who walked there (i.e., snuck in the back door without paying twenty bucks to take a ride up there). I did the needful at the Daishi hall, couldn’t find the main hall, and then ran into two pilgrims who’d stayed at the same inn I had, who told me I needed to come to the summit of the mountain with them, which I gladly did - that’s where the ski area is as well as a strange hexagonal tower with a closed ticket office (free for a limited time!).
Eventually, I did find the main hall, did the business there, and then was distracted by eggplant. Like, wooden eggplants you could write on. An eggplant statue. A giant stone eggplant you could step through. Eggplant emojis. I didn’t quite understand what the deal was, but I guess the temple really hearts eggplant? Anyhow: now that I’d enjoyed the view for a good long while and gotten my book stamped and signed, I reckoned it was time to start the long, tedious trail back down the mountain on the other side. It definitely was those things; what with the recent rains, it was slippery and muddy in places, but mostly just obnoxiously steep. Still, I took my time, walked as safely as I could, and finally reached quiet country roads back down towards sea level.
Eventually, there was a large covered space with some chairs strewn about next to a vending machine, so I sat down for a while, ate the rice balls the innkeeper had given me that morning, drank some cold barley tea, and switched into full-on road walking mode (pilgrimage gear in the pack, earbuds on, sunglasses ready to be deployed). It felt like it was still a ways to go; the sun was still out, it was getting to be fairly warm, and any joy that I’d had at making it to the summit and seeing those beautiful views was slowly being replaced by that familiar feeling of “oh fuck, not another fucking road walk, what the fuck”.
Finally, the last temple of the day showed up. It was a confusing space; I mistook some structure to the right of it for the Daishi temple, left some incense and a candle burning there, realized my mistake, did the stuff at the two correct temples, and got my stamp… and a banana. Huh. I didn’t realize Kagawa prefecture temples would be so into fruits and vegetables, but I’ll happily take a nice, ripe banana from a priest, I guess.
I started idly wondering what this final section of the pilgrimage had originally looked like before I replanned it all last week & couldn’t remember - note to self, maybe that’s something I can get Google Sheets to show me later on. Anyhow, I was very, very happy to finally get to my hotel, which turned out to be a classic Japanese-style concrete resort type thing with maybe sixty rooms, a gift shop and a restaurant, and a very nice onsen as well as English speaking staff. I did my laundry - thank God for cheap hotel laundromats in this country - so now everything’s clean and good again for tomorrow’s no doubt unavoidable indignities. Dinner was an absolute feast, complete with a couple of tiny pieces of grill-it-yourself beef; I am not a fan of beef, but it is admittedly very good here. And then there was one last phenomenal sunset from my room to enjoy before bed.
Looking at the weather, though, it looks like things will almost certainly go to shit about 36 hours from now, give or take. This means I’ve got about a dozen temples to get through quickly; after that, though, it’ll probably change this trip into a train-riding trip, not a walking trip. I’ll have a look at the map again before bed, but if it’s really going to rain as much as it’s likely to, at least it looks like I’m in a place where most of the next 15 temples are near train stations. It gets dicier next week; there are 4 days of must walk, can’t take a train temples then, but I think my luck might just hold out a tiny bit more for those to be easy enough.
Random notes: As of today, it’s 964 km or 599 miles walked. I thought that was a lot - but my husband Dan walked way more than that on the PCT. Yikes. That really puts things into perspective!
Health is holding up; the subdermal (not subdural, whoops!) hematoma-thingy is barely noticeable at this point, but the first twinge of plantar fasciitis showed up yesterday. Thankfully, the blister situation has been under control for weeks and I’m generally feeling great, even if my f’n shoes are a little bit small and uncomfortable. It’s only a few more days, now, though - and they’re already so worn out I’ll probably have to toss them when I get home.