Day 55: T83-T86 (from Takamatsu)
It’s 1092.8 kilometers from T1 to T88. As of today, I’ve walked just over 1,100 kilometers - in my mind, I’ve already succeeded at what I set out to do. Of course, though, the pilgrimage isn’t over yet.
This morning, I woke up especially early for some reason and set to ruminating: when should I go to breakfast? what should I do with my day? How bad is the rain going to be? The longer I’ve been walking this pilgrimage, the more certain I am of who I am; at this point, I don’t think there are any additional lessons I can learn. In short, I feel like I’m done. It’s time to move on to the next adventure; it’s time to get home to my marmot.
With that in mind, I tore through breakfast (Japanese, better than average, with a massive piece of grilled mackerel) and got on a Takamatsu-Kotohira Electric Railroad train. Yes, in keeping with my decidedly mild trainspotter tendencies, I was excited to ride another private railway in the land of JR. This time, I was headed for Ichinomiya-ji, T83, which is in the far southern suburbs of Takamatsu. It’s a long story, but because I made the decision last week to move things up one day, that also meant that I absolutely had to get to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum today as they’re not open tomorrow, Wednesday.
I had been thinking about how to pick up the stretches of city road walking I’d skipped west of Takamatsu, figuring I could do it tomorrow, which should be a sunny day, but then convinced myself it’d make more sense to just pick up the T83 stamp today instead - it’s not too far from a train station, it’s raining but not too bad, and at any rate I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s better to do too much than too little. As Liberace famously said, too much of a good thing is wonderful, right?
The rain was more like atmospheric mists with attitude, nothing serious, so I wasn’t worried about getting wet. It was in fact a short walk up to the temple; my time there was largely noteworthy because I felt like I had to futz around with this Japanese iOS app that should ping a Bluetooth beacon at the temple and automatically mark me as having visited, but it wasn’t working for some reason. Whatever! I’d tossed all the garbage incense so was back to the nice stuff that smells forest-y; I went through the motions, got a stamp, and happily ran into a modern ossuary (visitors not allowed inside) because of the app shenanigans, so that was awesome:
And then back on the train to central Takamatsu; on the way back up there, I decided to just go for it and start the T84-T85 walk immediately. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum is located between the two; the official guide says T84 only a 30-minute walk from the train station, which I hereby declare to be 100% bullshit. It’s about 2.5 km from the station, but it’s also 300 meters elevation gain from there, so no way is anyone going to do that in 30 minutes. I had figured I had about an hour’s buffer for my museum reservation, but that dwindled somewhat after the tough, 45-minute slog up there from the train station.
The rain was somehow getting worse, even though all of the forecasts said it should’ve been clearing up at that point in the day; it went from mild drizzle to lackluster actual rain by then & I could start to feel my pants getting wet. Not good.
Thankfully, it was only 5.6 km to the next temple & the Noguchi museum was about halfway from there, so although I was now running late enough to not have enough time to eat at the locally-famous udon restaurant near the museum, I had enough time to get there. And that’s of course when things went tango uniform.
What you’re looking is T84 on the left (the dots are me walking around to the various parts to do temple stuff). Then, there’s a derelict hotel to the East; you turn right there and start descending a very steep, very slippery, moderately dangerous slope. You’ll note a lot of dots there that don’t go anywhere - that’s because a massive tree had come down in this morning’s rainstorm and completely blocked the trail. I didn’t have rope or hiking poles with me, so there was absolutely no safe way to continue… so I had to slowly make my way back up the ravine (not easy given that it was raining with some real attitude at this point) to the main trail. The clock was ticking, but I knew better than to hurry - that’s a surefire way to just make shit worse. I had a look at the map; at the downed tree, I could see a road below that the map said the trail crossed, so I thought aha, if I can just follow that road down, I can try to make up for time. Of course, that road makes a huge jog to the north before coming back down to the south… and I made the mistake of taking a paved trail, not a road, thinking they’d certainly intersect because that’s what they looked like the did on the map. But no! They do not. The trail is on the top of a ridgeline; the road goes through a short tunnel under the ridge. There is a very short, precipitous trail from the trail down to the road that did not look at all safe - but I figured I didn’t have much of an option other than to go for it, but take it slowly and do it as carefully as I could. I do not have pictures of either of these bad trails; taking pictures is risky, so I didn’t. There were some ropes along the way, but they were loosely tied and unstable, so not helpful. But I made it down okay - it just took time. I would not care to repeat that experience.
From there, you can see that I followed the main road back to the actual trail, then took it off to the East. That bit was less bad, but the second it hit pavement, it got even steeper and again, lots of ropes along the side to help you not fall down. Great. After that, I was back in a city, more or less, so I walked as quickly as I could without slipping, while trying taxi apps (no rides available) and Google Maps to try to find a faster way to the museum. Neither option worked; I got to the museum about 15 minutes late - but thankfully it’s not a museum, just a couple of buildings, so it wasn’t a big deal to run back and forth to the reception to get checked in and join the official tour group. Whew. They even refunded the 2nd backup ticket I’d bought in case I couldn’t see anything today. I’d show you a picture of something from there, but they have a strict no picture policy - there was a large workshop/shed with some great pieces, as well as a house he’d had moved there, a classic Japanese style house, and a few cool rocks here and there outside. So not a whole heck of a lot, but wonderful to see it, finally. (We couldn’t make it work in 2016 because of their limited availability.)
Afterwards, the udon restaurant was on the henro trail, so I stopped - I needed a break, some food and water, and most importantly to get out of the rain for a little bit. Yum. And then right back on the trail - briefly, before happening across a cable car (if that’s the right word) that was celebrating its 60th anniversary and which headed straight to T85. Yes please: that would’ve been another kilometer uphill in the rain, slippery, and I’d have enough.
Not much to say about T85 other than it was wet, really wet. It was a bit of a production number to get my stamp book out of its dry bag at every temple, but absolutely worth it as I didn’t want to repeat the water damage incident from T12.
Now that my fun meter was truly pegged - I was soaking wet, chafing had begun, and the detours were exhausting, I figured I’d just walk to the nearest train station and go home. Of course, that didn’t happen; it was maybe 4 kilometers to the station, but then hey, it’s only 1 stop from the station where Shido-ji, T86 is, and that leaves me 30 minutes before closing time at 17h00 - so what the heck, let’s go for it. I followed the herds of schoolchildren to the train station, rode it a single stop East, and walked another ten minutes to the next to next to last temple of the entire pilgrimage.
I actually really dug the overall vibe of this one; lush gardens that felt more like Thailand than Japan, way less orderly than you would expect from Japan. This temple is celebrating its 1,400 year anniversary, so they’re busy renovating stuff, which led to the louche Southeast Asian vibe; one more stamp and I was done for day, truly, so I walked back to the station. As is amusingly the case for some towns here, this smallish town had two stations for the two separate railways lines just a block apart; the huge JR station with trains to major cities and then this one:
There were two trains leaving from the JR station soon: a slow train and then a fast train ten minutes later; I splurged and went for the fast train, figuring it’d be worth an extra six bucks to get back to my hotel room more quickly so that I could use the public bath upstairs to soak some warmth back into my bones - it’s weirdly cold here today, even though it’s already June - and then have a glass of wine and start rebooking things yet again. I will finish the pilgrimage tomorrow, but I’ll take a bus back to my hotel when I’m done. It’s not worth it to me to spend one more day walking on a paved road for 26 kilometers and have to deal with luggage forwarding just to say I’ve walked from T88 back to T1: there are other things I would prefer to do with my time here. I’ve walked enough.
Random notes: I had hoped to write a proper Full Pour tasting note for this $10 Medoc from 7-Eleven, but I’m wiped. All I can say is it’s actually really good, especially for the money. Surprising!
Tomorrow’s walk involves an awful lot of elevation gain, but I think I’m more than up to it. I’ll take the big pack; it’s important to me that the connector on the back of the pack is along for the big day tomorrow. I’ll skip the walk from T86 to T87 - you guessed it, another 7 km or so of boring-ass road walking - and just take a train straight to T87 and go from there.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think it’d be a baller move to stop short of T88 and declare that the journey is the reward, not having completed it, but c’mon. I know myself better than that. I’m getting all of the completion certificates that I can for this one!
After rebooking the next few days, the plan is Wednesday/walk T87-T88, then bus back to my hotel here; Thursday/bus to T1, train to Tokushima station, check into hotel, visit Montbell, celebratory dinner; Friday/bus to Osaka, train to Koyasan, overnight at luxury temple (last minute deal FTW!) for the hell of it; Saturday/visit Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum and report a successful pilgrimage, then back to Osaka for two nights; Sunday/visit Kobo Daishi’s old temple in Kyoto, then free day; Monday/Expo, then off to an airport hotel; Tuesday/fly home.