On the Eve of a Pilgrimage

September the 24th is my mother’s birthday. It’s also the day of a new moon, typically a good time to start new things.

Way back in July, I dreamed up this day as the one when I would start the pilgrimage, back before I’d bought a tent, sleeping bag, and backpack. Before I’d bought THE book that has maps of the entire 750 miles in English.

Now that the day is tomorrow, I’m realizing it probably would have made more sense to simply say that I’ll leave in late September and check the weather forecast instead….a typhoon is scheduled to make an appearance here on Shikoku tomorrow, September 24th.

Fortunately I’m not in any rush and Matt and Nori are all too happy for me to stay another day and help clean on Wednesday like usual!

A million people have talked about this pilgrimage in English on the internet, so I’m not going to get into the details too much here. The above map is the island of Shikoku, the purple circles are the 88 Buddhist temples that the pilgrimage route connects. Kobo Daishi was born on Shikoku and is responsible for bringing Buddhism to Japan from China in the early 800s. He is a revered figure in Japanese society, so much so that the staff that pilgrims (including me!) walk the trail with is said to be an embodiment of his spirit. This is an article that Matt, who owns (with his wife, Nori) the guesthouse where I’m living, wrote for a Japanese publication last year. It gives a good overview of the walk.

I’ll be starting my walk at temple 51, as it’s the closest one to my guesthouse. It’s called Ishite-ji and is known for being the oddest temple of the bunch, something that makes me love it even more, of course.

On Sunday, my Japanese teacher invited me to a tea ceremony at Ishite-ji, and it was then that I bought the traditional white vest that pilgrims wear and the book in which each temple’s calligraphy can be inscribed. You can see examples of this here.

Now that it’s Tuesday, I’ve packed, unpacked and re-packed twice. Now that I’ve made a master packing list, I’m satisfied with what I’m bringing and the weight of my pack.

Also last night, I got some practice putting my tent up on the roof, just to get the hang of it.

With the typhoon coming in tonight, it was probably my last sunset from this roof for awhile…

My walk should take a little under two months depending on how many kilometers I’m comfortable with walking everyday. There is an extensive system of huts along the path for walking pilgrims to use as shelter. Plus some of the temples provide a place out of the elements as well. Knowing me, I’ll be eating mostly from convenience stores, with many sidetrips into grocery stores for my daily fruit and veggie habits.

Austin gave me his old iPod, and Nori here at the guesthouse got me registered with a local convenience store that has free wifi, meaning I’ll be able to send and receive emails from the trail!

And, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be ending up right where I started, at temple 51 Ishite-ji and Sen Guesthouse. My flight to the States should get me home just in time for Thanksgiving in Virginia!

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been excessively anxious about this adventure of mine. I’m expecting to be challenged and stretched everyday that I walk. I’m also expecting to be a bit different than I am now after it’s all over. Wish me luck everyone!

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The Return Trip

It took three buses, a subway and two ferries to get me back from Korea, though it wasn’t really as bad as it could have been.

Ana and I had a great Sunday together. Above you’ll see us with an American monk who lives at a Korean temple in Gwangju where we went for a group meditation.

Monday morning though, I parted ways with Ana as she headed off for work and I headed off for Busan! Which is Korea’s main port city in the southeast of the country. The bus ride to the city dropped me off at the bus station, where I deciphered the subway system to get myself to the international ferry port.

Monday night I had an overnight ferry to the Japanese city of Fukuoka. It was on this ferry that I made my first friends in Japanese!

Yoko and Tamaki were in my ladies’ dorm on the overnight ferry and somehow we got to talking for over an hour on Monday night. Before that I didn’t know I knew enough Japanese words to talk to anyone for more than five minutes!

They ended up giving me a ride into Fukuoka from the port the next morning. And then I spent a lovely day walking around Fukuoka, which is actually a really big Japanese city.

I found this beautiful park in the city center and read the book I borrowed from Ana’s shelf!

By the time I had taken another long bus ride to the next international ferry port and gotten on my second overnight ferry in a row, I was pretty tired of traveling. Fortunately all I had left upon arrival was a simple half-hour bus ride at 5:15am the next morning that took me straight back to Sen Guesthouse.

Now I’m back in my little room, looking forward to cleaning and cooking some more this week with Nori and Matt!

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Gwangju, South Korea

I find myself in Korea this sunny weekend, and fall has made it to this country more quickly than to my little corner of southern Japan.

This trip had been in the works for awhile, mostly for technical reasons. I need 90 more days as a tourist in Japan so that I can attempt my pilgrimage walk around Shikoku, and Korea happens to be the closest and easiest country to make a weekend trip to.

This is the part of the story where Couchsurfing enters! I knew I didn’t want to spend the weekend in Seoul, as I’ve already been there several times and don’t love it. So I set about searching for a good host anywhere in Korea and came upon Ana, an American living and working in Gwangju, in the southwest of the country.

From the second Ana picked me up at the bus station, I have had the best Korean weekend ever. She’s taken me to not one, but two(!) amazing vegetarian Korean buffets (this in a country that has one of the most meat-centric diets I’ve ever seen).

On Saturday we found our way to the base of a popular mountain for hiking, and stopped by a restaurant that serves what Koreans think of as temple food, with no animal products at all. It was amazing, lots of types of kimchi, and more veggies than I could dream up!

Ana teaches at a well-known alternative school and even wrote this really great article about it, in a local English-language paper recently. On Saturday after our nature walk, we met up with some of Ana’s students to attend a lecture in English at the local international center. Then the five of us went to a very Korean cafe for tea and ice cream!

As if that wasn’t enough, Ana and I then made our way to a community concert where I got to hear traditional Korean songs on a cool evening in a park.

I really can’t say enough about this host or about this town. Ana has truly immersed herself in this community, by learning Korean and by becoming invested in the issues and lives of the people she’s met and befriended here. In just a day or so, she has taught me so much about the history of this country and this city in particular.

Sunday morning we woke up to do some yoga on the roof and ended up having breakfast up there as you can see above.

I never would have thought that a visa-run trip could be so fun!

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Camping on Gogoshima

Nori and Matt hadn’t had a day off in over two months.

Since they live at the guesthouse, they wake up, walk down to the first floor and immediately start working, tending to guests who are checking out or answering logistical questions. There is a lot of hand-holding of foreigners in their line of work.

So the fact that they took a day off to go camping with me was a big deal. Wednesday after the last guest checked out, we raced around, cleaning the place at warp speed, and then took off by bike for a ferry port on the other side of the city.

The ferry ride was only ten minutes from the Matsuyama side of Shikoku, but once we touched down, it seemed like another world over there. This island is so un-touristed, that not five minutes after we left the ferry port, a local asked to take our picture!

We cycled across the island looking for a good beach to camp on, and didn’t really ever find a great one. We settled for a strip of sand next to a dive-y looking fish shack cafe and asked the owner if we could camp there. He was incredibly hospitable and let us use their water line and even sold us some beer!

The best parts of the trip were the ones I didn’t take pictures of, of course. Nori and Matt came prepared with charcoal and tons of cut-up veggies and this amazing fish that we grilled over a nice fire. We sat around eating til we couldn’t eat anymore and then got to fall asleep to the sound of the waves lapping against the shore.

Even though Matsuyama is a coastal town, this was my first time during my stay here to see or touch the ocean. And it reminded me of a day not so long ago, when I was on the Los Angeles side of the Pacific, getting my feet wet in the same ocean!

It’s such a small and big world, all at the same time.

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How to Drink Tea in Japan

There’s a sliver of Okabe-san’s face at the bottom right. Here we were packed like sardines into this waiting room before the ceremony.

My Japanese teacher, Okabe-san, and I have a lot of fun in class. For whatever reason, my mannerisms in English crack her up and we spend a good portion of each class laughing. She’s been studying the art of Japanese tea ceremony off-and-on for the past thirty years and invited me to come to one at the local cultural center on Sunday.

Okabe-san presented me with all the little tools you need to go to a tea ceremony…a little fan to put in front of you when you bow, a little knife to cut your tea cake, and little papers to clean off chopsticks!

Pictures weren’t allowed during the actual ceremony, so I can’t show you the tasty little cake we were served, or all the ritual surrounding being served, all the bows and turning the tea cup a certain way several times before you drink it.

Fortunately Okabe-san was seated next to me and could show me the ropes, with little prompts under her breath!

After the ceremony was over, we went up to the front where the main teacher had been demonstrating a real tea ceremony with millions more little rituals to it.

From what I could understand, there was a famous calligrapher attending this ceremony and he had drawn the above kanji, meaning something like “A calm wind blowing through the fields brings autumn” or something like that. There was also this flower arrangement that people seemed to be admiring.

Honestly this whole experience absolutely thrilled the anthropology major still lurking inside me. I loved getting to see how interested Japanese are in learning and experiencing their own culture. I loved seeing all the women in their kimonos and I loved the attention to detail and ritual that are involved in being served and serving tea. Little windows into culture like this are one of the main reasons I love traveling so much. not just traveling though, really getting to sink my teeth into a culture. Something that happens only with forming relationships with people and attempting to speak the language!

Outside the cultural center is a beautifully maintained garden with all the requisite trees, stones and fish in the pond!

Okabe-san invited me to another tea ceremony in two weeks at the very temple where I’ll be starting my pilgrimage on the 24th….stay tuned!

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Ishizuchi-san

As most of you probably know, I keep pretty grandmotherly hours. Sleep happens for me roughly between 10pm and 6:30am or so and I can get fairly disgruntled when my schedule is thrown off. Nevertheless sometimes it’s worth hashing out an early-morning plan til 11:30pm…

Monday evening around 9:30pm I was getting ready for bed, when an opportunity came along to climb a mountain in the morning. Tuesday was my day off, and I took caution to the wind, cancelled all my plans and headed off. It was spectacular.

Mt. Ishizuchi is the tallest peak in western Japan, and though it’s nowhere close in height or popularity to Fuji-san, it was captivating in a way that few places truly are.

My partner in crime for this adventure was one of our guests, and a friend of Matt and Nori’s, Ken, who is a world-traveler in his own right. He basically chauffeured me around, getting us a rental car (that only he could drive), navigating us to the mountain through very windy roads, and then translating any conversation we had with passing hikers or with the monks on top of the mountain.

From what I understood, this mountain is an important site for the Shinto religion. The tip top of the mountain was enclosed as it is sacred somehow I think. There was also a mini-shrine at the top and a guesthouse of sorts where the monks and some rotating workers stay to take care of guests.

The trail up was extremely well-maintained, in a lot of places these wooden pathways were underfoot, mostly because the terrain is so steep and rock slides happen a lot.

After the first kilometer or two, I found myself stopping every five minutes or so, just to process how breathtaking the scenery was. We were in the midst of clouds most of the day, so there was an otherworldly, very calm feeling throughout the hike.

Another pretty crazy aspect was the last half kilometer that turned out to be mostly scaling a rock face that had huge heavy metal chains hanging down. It would have been pretty impossible to scramble up without the chains, as it was actually pretty difficult getting up even with them!

We made it to the top by 2pm or so and ate our lunches catching glimpses of a neighboring (and slightly lower) peak nearby through the passing clouds. It was magical.

This place was definitely one of the coolest that I’ve ever been to. Not bad for a completely unexpected and spontaneous outing on my day off!

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