Roving Japan

Day 39 Photoset

Our first day with the car was pretty fun! It’s amazing how far you can go when you’re traveling at 60kph instead of 4kph.

We got a bit of a late start, not leaving Takamatsu until around 11am, but it only took an hour to get to the first stop of the day, Konpirasan. The Konpirasan shrine is famous for the 1,367 stairs it takes to get to the top. When I first read about that, I pictured one of those famous temples with the single, super long staircase that goes straight up. This temple is not like that at all. The first few hundred stairs take you through a shopping mall area. The rest of the stairs go up in chunks of about 50-100 steps, but are broken up by long stretches of flat walkways. The temple itself has several levels with the main temple buildings about 75% of the way up. The top shrine, which was quite a ways up and took a lot of effort getting too… was under construction. Thanks guys! Way to make my climb to the top worth it!

My foot felt pretty good today, somehow going up stairs doesn’t flex the foot as painfully as walking on flat ground. However, heading DOWN the 1367 steps was a bit painful.

When we reached the mall area, a couple of guys carrying an old women in a palaquin stopped to talk to me when I told them, “Ganbatte!” One of the guys was impressed that I could speak any Japanese at all. After a bit, they asked me if I wanted to try to carry the palaquin! OF COURSE! They wouldn’t let me actually walk with it, but I got to pick it up. It was kind of heavy, but the main discomfort was the bamboo pole digging into my shoulder. Those guys are pretty tough. The one who stopped to talk to me is 75 years old! If you’re interested in having a couple guys carry you up the stairs, it only costs $68.

After the temple, we drove south to Oboke gorge. The gorge is actually broken into 2 parts, the north part is called ‘Koboke’ and the south part is called ‘Oboke’. It’s hard to translate, but basically the names imply that whether you use little steps or big steps, its still dangerous to walk here.

Back at the rental car place, we found a magazine that showed some good routes through Shikoku. The book mentioned this gorge, and how for $10 you can take a boat ride down the river. So we decided to splurge and ride down the river for the 30minute tour.

The gorge was pretty, but unfortunately, like most rivers in Japan, it had tall cement walls on one side. For some reason, Japan feels the need to turn all its rivers into concrete channels. I’m happy the water level was so low today, it let us have about 20 meters of rock before the concrete walls begin. If you didn’t look up too far, you almost didn’t notice it. We tried to photograph only the pretty parts!

The book also had a picture of a cool vine bridge crossing a pretty mountain river, so we figured we might as well drive the 15minutes to see that as well. When we arrived, we immediately started feeling like something was amiss. This is a single vine bridge, yet the tiny town nearby had enough parking to handle hundreds of people. We started thinking, “Man, this bridge better be AWESOME if this many people come here.” Guess what? This bridge ranks right up there with “The World Largest Ball Of Twine” It’s a total tourist trap. They charge $5 to walk across it, and you can only walk across once. Also, the “vines” are hiding steel cables. Nice. We took some pictures and left as fast as possible. Glad we parked in the free parking and no, we didn’t pay the $5 to walk across. We walked across better bridges on the mountain trail in Yakushima.

With the bridge out of the way, we were done for the day. The only thing left was to find a place to sleep. We started driving down the highway, looking for a place to eat and then camp. An hour and a half later we were in Kochi. We drove all the way through the mountains and couldn’t find a single place to eat or camp! In Kochi we found a 24hr Joyfull and made plans for tomorrow. Joyfull is like IHOP or Sherry’s. One of those 24hr family style restaurants. A real life saver when you want to spend time looking at maps and reading books.

Tonight we are camping next to a river about 20km outside of Kochi. We are going to head back to town tomorrow to check out the castle, then go back to the mountains to see Ishizuchi-san, the tallest peak in western Japan. There are several campgrounds near the mountain, so we are looking forward to that!

(Photo of the camp from the next morning)

Day 11 Photoset

We decided not to stay a second night in Nobeoka. We weren’t at all happy with the hotel, especially the fact that we spent $5 and 2.5 hours using their clothes dryer, and STILL had wet clothes. We didn’t want to give them any more money, so we checked out and headed to the train station.

While at the station, we spent a few hours coming up with a plan for the upcoming days. We looked up hotels in Oita prefecture and came to a decision regarding our walk/train ratio. We are going to take a train tomorrow to the town of Tsukumi. We have a hotel reserved there, so hopefully we can get in a day of rest while a pesky blister heals on my left foot. From there, we are going to walk north to Usuki and see the 1000 year old Buddhas. After that, we will work our way around to Beppu for an extended stay while enjoying the onsens.

Once the plan was settled upon, we had to figure out what to do TODAY. Since the hotel in Tsukumi was booked for tonight, we had to reserve it for tomorrow night. That left us without a place to stay tonight.

Since we are taking a train tomorrow, we felt that we should get in a little walking today. So we packed up and walked north out of Nobeoka. We only went about 8 miles, but it was a pretty walk through the river valley.

We have invented a fun game to play while walking over rivers. The water here is very clear, and there are a lot of fish. Sometimes we are able to scare the fish with our shadows. It’s a lot like those games you see in malls and movie theaters, where little kids can “kick” a ball that is being projected on the floor. We stand on the bridge, waving at the fish, and they swim away from our shadows. Its actually fairly amusing. I think everyone who watches us thinks we are crazy.

We are camping in a rest area off of hwy10. There is a small train station about 10minutes away. Tomorrow morning at 6:11am we will catch the train to Tsukumi. If we miss the train, we are screwed since the 6:11am train is the only one that stops at this station until like 7pm. We gotta get up early!