Day 50: T71-T75
Here’s a map of what I expect to have actually walked when I finish up a week from tomorrow:
Not too bad! There are five major gaps: one day outside of Tokushima when I needed a break from the Bad Shoes and the mess they caused; about 50 km of road walking before Kochi, 30 km of road walking around Cape Ashizuri, 30 km of road walking before Kumakogen, and finally another 40 km of road walking between Iyo-Saijo and Iyo-Mishima. The other smaller gaps are much the same, just less visible - road walking sucks and I would prefer not to do it where possible. So, about 200 km of the standard pilgrim trail I didn’t walk, although I did see much of it from a train or a bus (just not the bit before Kumakogen).
As of today, though, I’ve walked about 1,000 kilometers or 620 miles - not bad! The ‘official’ pilgrimage trail is 1,136.4 km; there’s a good chance I will have walked that much by the time I get on a bus to Osaka, and I am very pleased with that result.
So! Back to yesterday… where was I… oh, that’s right! The Kamenoi Hotel in Kan-onji - and whoa, breakfast was outrageously good. I love me a breakfast buffet, and this one was as good as the REF in Matsuyama. The only glitch was me trying to carry a tiny cup of coffee back to my table and failing - that damn left hand is just a little bit wonky still, so I did spill some, which led to major embarrassment with the staff. Oh well, I’m sure they’ve seen worse!
The day’s walking looked to be on the tedious side - almost all road walks, first across to the coast to visit two temples, then back to the East, finished with a long drift North to get to my hotel, a somewhat beat-up roadside rest area with an onsen and (or so they claimed) a theme park. Thankfully, I was extremely well fed, so the walk went by mostly quickly. Now, I think I’ve mentioned the custom of osettai before - that thing where people give pilgrims stuff on the trail - and that happened again fairly early on when a nicely chunky Japanese bear in his 30s pulled over and insisted on giving me something from his minivan - water? no, my pack was too heavy, so… he gave me a pack of interdental picks, which I found hilarious and also incredibly useful (I do love me some high quality interdental picks). He shook my hand, asked me where I was from - I always say California, Los Angeles, and usually say Dodgers with a baseball mime thing, if only because people know who the Dodgers are - and he lit up, happy that I liked Shohei Ohtani. (I mean, I guess I do? I’ve never seen a Dodgers game!) So that was a great start to the day; it felt comfortable and friendly as opposed to that weird haiku-origami-write in my book thing from earlier in the week.
Apologies if I’ve mentioned this before, but there are a few different maps, guides, books, and apps that you can use to find your way around the pilgrimage. There’s a decent English language app called Henro Helper that I enjoy using, but it often imposes its own idea as to what ‘a good route’ might mean. For Kan-onji, though, that was more than welcome. Instead of going straight to T68/T69 - those two temples are at the same location, confusingly - it takes you out of the way a tiny bit to visit two things you might not get to see otherwise: a Shinto shrine on top of the hill next to the beach, and an enormous sand sculpture of a coin that’s said to bring good luck that was constructed centuries ago. It was a slog up the hill, but it was nice to get away from traffic for a bit. At the top, a friendly couple offered to take a picture of me; I won’t post it here, though, because I’m sweaty as hell in that picture. Anyhow, back down the hill and around the back to the Dual Temple Experience: T68 is hiding behind a modern concrete box of sorts, T69 is next door and looks a bit run down, and the monk working at the combined office was the most bored I’ve ever seen one, stuck double-stamping stamp books all day (but at least the site also gets to charge double). Amusingly, there were also twin cats there for some reason; I tried to feed them some of an energy bar, but only one of them took me up on the offer…
The sun was now out in full force; views from the temples’ gate were excellent. It was warm, but not hot; if there were mosquitoes, I didn’t feel any. From this point, the day’s walking was very simple: kind of a big L shaped day, all along busy roads until the very end, so not a lot of fun. The next temple up was a relatively large one, but with zero vending machines for some reason (unhelpful given the weather). They did on the other hand have a massive pagoda:
Thankfully, it wasn’t too far from there to (yet another) Sushiro (conveyor belt sushi restaurant). I wasn’t particularly hungry given my enormous breakfast (scattered sushi, coffee, pastries, etc.) but I did want to take a break for a while, drink a lot of water, and get some more of their pumpkin tempura, so I did just that. Afterwards, I kept walking - and decided I was going to embark on an absurd side question to find a pair of Netflix underwear in my size as well as a Hiroshima Toyo Carp (baseball team) scarf towel from FamilyMart. I’d seen these things once, although not in my size, and didn’t buy them… alas. So now I’ve got one more agenda item, LOL. Anyhow: that was a long 12 plus kilometers from that last temple to my hotel, so that amused me a bit. I also saw that there was a McDonald’s along the way - but damn it, no more Grimace Shakes, so I went away empty-handed. But lo, the last FamilyMart on the way did in fact have one last pair of (very dusty) Netflix boxer briefs in size XL. I’m starting to think I’ll never find that scarf towel again, though, judging by eBay prices…
The onsen I’d booked a room at didn’t look great from the outside - I climbed up a steep hill to get there and came out behind it, which was disheveled and extremely loud due to some equipment I didn’t recognize. Yikes. But the reception looked better and they did have my room ready - which turned out to be just above the loud equipment outside. Sigh. They can’t all be winners… As is often the case (tonight, for example) there was no shower or tub in my (Japanese-style) room, so now what? I didn’t want to go straight to the public bath, so I changed into a less-sweaty T-shirt, put my pilgrim stuff back on, and started the 1,000 meters or so climb up to Iyadana-ji, T71, which is highly unusual in that it’s not just way up the side of a mountain, but that the two main places of worship aren’t close to one another. Instead, you have to allllll the way up to the main hall, then halfway back down to the Daishi hall - so many stairs! Around 500, I think, according to the signs. Also unusual: the Daishi hall was I think all indoors and part of the staff lodging (?) - when you lit candles and incense, it felt like you were doing it in someone’s living room. Not only that, but it was unclear which parts of it all were the correct places to read the sutras - there was one more area around the corner that felt a bit like a cave. So confusing! Anyhow, no matter, I got my stamp and headed back down.
At the base of the staircase, a handsome European bear-type dude was pausing for a sec before starting the climb - and then he said hey, this might sound weird, but is your name Chris? Heh. Turns out he had had a casual conversation with the Belgian cub at some point and had heard the rumors of a Californian dadbear with a huge white beard and thought he’d say hi. Not a bear himself, alas, but a very pleasant break in my day for some general conversation. (Plus I’m always happy when someone does the whole ‘but wait, where are you really from?’ routine when I speak German with them. Wheee!)
Anyhow, back down to the hotel with a quick stop at the roadside station and ‘theme park’ - really just a rusted Wild Mouse type attraction that probably hasn’t run in years, a gift shop, and a bunch of sad playground equipment. Because I’m obvious, I bought a canned highball, then retired to room to chill a bit before my 19h00 dinner.
I’d forgotten, but I’d ordered the fanciest dinner that they had at an extra cost of $20 or so. That is seldom a good idea as it usually means two things I like but don’t love: beef and whole fish. At least the beer was enormous! Then again, all of it was - more food than I think I’ve seen anywhere on this trip, full stop. Not bad, in fact pretty good, but man, I do not like the time and patience that it takes to eat a fish with chopsticks, especially one with a lot of small bones…
After dinner, I tried to go to sleep, but that fucking noise kept going and going. I chatted with my partner Dan for a bit, the clock struck ten, and then finally things shut down outdoors, so I managed to get some shuteye.
Breakfast was as chintzy as dinner was generous - and that was probably a good thing. Because I’ll be back home in two weeks, I also started PReP again today - when I left California, I asked my doctor how to taper off of PReP as I’d be celibate for the whole time I was on the pilgrimage. So, watch out Palm Springs, I’ll be back home soon and I’ve initiated shield deployment, so to speak…
When looking at the maps before breakfast, I noticed that I’d somehow wildly underestimated how much walking would be on the agenda today - only two, maybe three hours until I recached Zentsu-ji, T75, the biggest temple complex of the trip, the headquarters of a Shingon Buddhist sect, and home to the temple lodging where I’d be staying tonight. It was also supposed to start raining around noon, so I figured I’d just visit all the temples I could in the morning, drop my bag at the inn, and then take the train to see a couple of temples that wouldn’t be easy to see on foot, especially if it really started raining heavily tomorrow as per the forecast.
The walk to the first two temples of the day actually went through a bamboo forest for a short while; it was lovely, with a woodpecker sighting - and then, for some reason, there was a tiny red light district after the trail went under the expressway, with a love hotel, a karaoke bar, and a couple of, uh, massage parlors, I think? Rawr!
The first two temples were mildly charming, with T73 having an especially nice view (as well as a vending machine with water imported from Mount Shasta, California - heh), but it was T74 that seemed to really have its shit together, at least in terms of merchandising/branding. Heck, even I had to buy a couple of things there - so cute! No spoilers here, though, wouldn’t want this one friend of mine to figure out he can expect something from there given the temple logo…
After that, it felt like the worst walk on the pilgrimage was happening. T74 and T75 are both in the modern town of Zentsuji; it’s an industrial area, mostly, between the two, with heavy equipment, bad smells, polluted waterways, and truck traffic to boot. That is not the spiritually profound “welcome home” type experience I was kinda sorta hoping for!
There were no issues at all leaving my bag at the temple inn; what was tricky was figuring out where a lot of things are. The two halls (main/Daishi) aren’t in the same precinct; there’s a city street with a laughably bad liquor store between the two and it took me some time to figure that out. I did get my book stamped, but couldn’t find the main hall for some time. (I still haven’t found the treasure hall or the pitch-dark passageway the temple is famous for, but I’ll have time for that tomorrow, I’m sure.) And once all of that was done, I walked to the train station, bought a ticket for a far-away station, got on a train, and then revised my plan immediately. As I said, it would make the most sense to me to visit the harder-to-get-to temples today before it really started raining; T76 and T79 are both very close to train stations, but T77 and T78 are not.
I did visit T78 - meh, although the surprise basement was interesting - before deciding that the weather was looking better tomorrow, making a T75-T76-T77 walk a viable options. So, I did something different: a visit to B18, Kaigan-ji. Annoyingly, however, my phone battery was starting to die & I didn’t have my charger, so I was relying on my own memory of why that temple: because Kobo Daishi was born there… right? Well, close but not quite: I was at the correct temple, but the wrong part of the temple. Sigh. Off by a couple of hundred meters, but the temple stamp office was where I was at, so I figured okay, let’s see if this works. The issue is that bekkaku temples have their own, separate stamp books; if you’re visiting the 88 temples, then your stamp book doesn’t have a special page for any of the 20 extra sacred sites. Mine, for example, just has 6 extra, blank pages at the back of it; now, one of those has a stamp from B18 there. I’m hoping that doesn’t mess anything up when I get the completion stamp next week or visit Kobo Daishi’s grave and the temple in Kyoto associated with him…
A couple more trains, one very long walk, and zero Family Marts and I was back at my inn, checked in and was just about ready for a bath.
But first, a note on staffs: I didn’t buy or use one as I like my hiking poles too much - that, and the staffs they sell to pilgrims are too short. It’s always a little awkward, though, because you’re kinda sorta supposed to have one. Because this is a temple inn, they even made sure I had a place to store my staff overnight - but I don’t have one! Sniff. That, and my assigned shoe locker was not big enough for both of my shoes, just one of my shoes, LOL.
The public bath at the temple was excellent, but the other person using it (Chinese going by his name on his door, but I’m guessing New Zealand Chinese based on his clothing) had absolutely no idea about how to use a Japanese bath, so he just took off his clothes and got in the bath. Eww, gross. (You’re supposed to wash yourself first!). Dinner was served super early, at 17h30, and was vegetarian; there wasn’t much to eat, but I ate it; the Kobo Daishi-branded beer was $5 extra, but worth it because tasty. Now, it’s only 19h30 or so, but religious services start at 06h00 in the morning; given that I didn’t sleep much at all last night, I need to shut this party down right now and sleep.
Random notes: The tackiest temple merch I’ve seen so far was at T72 today - a golf ball-shaped charm for about seven bucks that purports to keep you at 72 par. Get it? (groan)
Lunch today was a single rice ball from 7-Eleven. Also, I’ve decided rooibos tea is a good option - tastes like something, no calories, no caffeine. I’ve mostly been drinking barley tea so far, but that might change. So exciting!
I’m excited to get to Takamatsu tomorrow - the Belgian cub completed his visit to all 88 temples & wants to celebrate with a pizza feast. Sounds good to me!