Four Corners of Japan

Day 19, Shimanto City, Kochi

“Tell him he shouldn’t sleep under bridges. There are lots of poisonous snakes under bridges in this season. Tell him he should always ask if the temple has tsuyadou, and he can stay there.”

My translater, a young o-henro-san (pilgrim) from Osaka, who in his everyday life works as a computer salesman, reported the words of the ama-san (female monk - abbess?), a shaven-headed woman who had stopped by the garage while walking her dog. It had been a stroke of luck meeting Yoshihisa, my pilgrim garage-mate for the night:

I had trudged into Kubokawa on Day 16 in Shikoku, the second day of my Shimanto River pilgrimage, and stopped by Iwamotoji, temple # 37 on the Hachijyu-ha-shou (88-Temple Pigrimage) feeling worn-out and dirty. It had been a hot, humid couple of days of wearing the same clothes I’ve worn all through Shikoku, and I was tiring of my own stench. I’d even sold out all my principles and bought a cake of soap, for stealth-clothes-washing at farmers’ hoses and in restroom sinks, and some typically ineffective Japanese spray-on deoderant. So disappointed was I in their performance under these admittedly extreme conditions, I’d even penned a haiku that was a cry for help:

The soap didn’t work,

Deoderant doesn’t work,

Maybe it’s permanent?

My priorities on entering Kubokawa that afternoon were simple. 1: Buy Beer. 2: Visit temple. 3: Find Bridge to sleep under. 4: Drink beer. 5: Achieve temporary enlightenment. 6: Turn off the ‘lights’ around 8:00 after writing in journal. 7: Achieve temporary & highly enjoyable unconsciousness. I found the beer alright, and kept it hidden as I strolled around the temple. I was disappointed at first — the first couple of pilgrimage temples I’d seen had been as ancient and inspiring as the tourist always hopes for, in obscure rural settings, but this one was in the centre of town, was rather small and lacking in mossy nooks and lichen-dappled crannies. I sat on a bench, drained, while a bus group of tour-pilgrims turned up and raced through a 10-minute prayer session before collecting their temple stamps and jumping back aboard the bus. Nearby, a young henro in pointed kasa hat and white byakue outfit, with prayer beads and wooden o-tsue staff, was smoking a cigarette. This intrigued me, as I’d assumed henro had to give up certain earthly indulgences for the duration of their circuit of the island. That was the delightful thing about my own private river pilgrimage: apart from female company (remind me again: what’s a female?) and the obvious comforts (hot water, electricity, a comfortable bed, TV, books, cooked food, conversation, clean clothes) I hadn’t had to give up… Hey, wait a minute, I’d given up a shitload of stuff. But I still had my beautiful can of beer. Now, where to drink it?

Answer: in the temple garage, with the smoking pilgrim. He had approached me after talking to the ama-san, and asked in Japanese where I was sleeping that night. I’d replied in Japanese, “Under a bridge, probably. I sleep under a bridge most nights.” He said in English, “Do you know about tsuyadou?” Turns out this is a word I definitely need to know — it meant accommodation provided by some temples for pilgrims (which they’d apparently assumed me to be). At Iwamotoji, the tsuyadou was an old garage behind the temple. And the price? Tada desu - free.

T’weren’t much, but it was home for the night — or at least a roof, a concrete floor and a rusty roller-door. There was a bunch of old boxes and a few chair cushions to sleep on. Yoshihisa had some basic English and we found out a little about each other. He liked Japanese history and thought Kobo Daishi — who, among other feats, had devised Shingon Buddhism, invented the hiragana alphabet and founded the famous Shikoku pilgrimage about 1,200 years ago, performing miracles wherever he went – was “like Superman”. He had decided on the pilgrimage a few years back and had the blessings of his employers and family. He was, fortunately, girlfriendless, a state just short of nirvana in the Buddhist universe (okay, in mine). An amazing coincidence: not only was it Day 16 for me in Shikoku, so it was for him on his journey from Temple # 1 in Tokushima — an incredible pace, until he confessed that, “If…somebody say, ‘You want a ride?’ …I say yes.” Today’s young pilgrims, I don’t know…

And since he had confessed to a certain lassitude with regard to walking the whole pilgrimage, I broached the delicate subject of pilgrim beverages. My beer was getting warm.

“Every henro different. Some henro…no drink. Some…no smoke. Some…no eat meat. Some everything. I drink beer…sometimes. I eat meat… all times.” And of course, he was fond of tabako.

10 minutes later we were walking to the convenience store. On the way we passed a middle-aged man on the upstairs balcony of a ryokan inn. A fellow o-henro-san, he indicated with a grimace and a series of hand gestures that he was paying 8,000 yen for the privilege of sleeping and dining there — our digs were primitive but the price was certainly more attractive. I got myself another beer and we each bought a cheap bento dinner of yakisoba and various side-dishes. I was tiring fast of peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate every night. Back in the garage, after the customary Kampai! and Itadakimasu, and the serious eating and drinking that followed, Yoshihisa proudly showed me his stamp books. At every temple visited, a page is inscribed in beautiful ink, and a little coupon-like slip of paper is added to an album. He also had me try on his pilgrim hat — a tight fit, and that wire frame would hurt — and told me that he washes his staff every night. In addition to the 88 main temples, he is also doing the Bangai, the optional-extra 20 temples that most pilgrims bypass. I had visited # 20 of these, O-Takiji, a few days into my Shikoku trek. He wasn’t going to be bullshitting any computer customers anytime soon. Shikoku is bigger than people think - especially on foot.

That night, the rain started at last. It sounded good on the tin roof and had me thinking of home. I have remembered how natural a subtropical climate feels for a Queenslander, after the cold horror of Hokkaido, and although the warm days can be uncomfortable after eight or nine hours of walking, I can handle them. One thing that bothered me though was Yoshihisa’s comment, as I outlined my plans for my own personal and highly eccentric pilgrimage, that, “I would like to follow the Shimanto River also.” I wondered if that was a hint, if he was tired of the solitary path and wanted some company for a few days. The gap between Iwamotoji and the next temple, at the tip of Cape Ashizuri, is around 80km, the longest distance between temples on the whole pilgrimage. Lonely Planet says There are few places as remote in all Japan (though many in Hokkaido would come close). I planned to head down to the cape after my 196km Shimanto mini-pilgrimage was over, but it would take a few days, and it would mean a much slower pace, lots of frustrating language problems, and the constant temptation (for Yoshihisa) to hop a ride. On the other hand, he could translate, I would find out a lot more about the area through which I was moving, and he would be some good company. It was hard, but ultimately my character was the decider. I prefer to walk alone. Part of the pilgrimage for me is a discovery of what I can accomplish on my own. And I am very fussy about who I let share my tent - he wasn’t carrying one in his backpack (which held at least four changes of clothing compared to my zero).

In the morning I could tell he was wondering what to do. I packed quickly and told him I was off, off into the driving rain and down lonesome Rt 381, arching north-west from Kubokawa to follow the beautiful and slowly widening Shimanto:

I told him I walked fast, when I wanted to, and that I believed I would see him, if he didn’t accept too many rides, somewhere on the Ehime coast between Ashizuri-Misaki and the next temple north. I hauled on the Monkey, opened my litle grey umbrella and stepped out from the garage. I wondered which bridge I would be camping under that night. Hopefully the rain would deter the snakes.

~ GOAT

Day 12, Kochi City, Shikoku.

Hello and happy Children’s Day from the capital of Kochi prefecture, in the deep south-west of Shikoku. Astute readers, if we have any, might wonder what the hell I am doing down here, since my last post outlined my plan to head west from the Iya Valley to Ishizuchi-San, our other Shikoku Waypoint, on the other side of the island in Ehime prefecture. Well, I figure it’s my journey and I can do with it what I will. Since more or less deciding that Four Corners of Japan is beyond my grasp for now, and since I’m enjoying Shikoku so much, I have been rambling along and improvising as the fancy takes me — and it seems to have taken me WAY off course. Actually I’m in danger of doing a Four Corners of Shikoku. But I thought I might as well have a look at Kochi while I was, sort of, in the neighbourhood, and so far I’m very glad I went with my instincts.

Kochi prefecture  is my favourite part of Shikoku so far. I haven’t had a chance to see the city yet — got sidetracked by this net cafe called, appropriately, ‘Lagoon’, while walking through flooded rice paddies on the first really wet day I’ve had — but so far the scenery has been great and the people splendidly generous. As an example, let me describe yesterday’s three hits of random food-based generosity.

In the morning I broke camp at my best campsite so far, right on the sandy bank of the lovely, kayaker-infested Yoshino River, and after rambling down Route 32 for an hour or two, I started talking to a middle-aged man at the lights of a tiny town called Tosa Ananai (Tosa is the old name for the province now known as Kochi). To my great surprise, I found that not only could I understand virtually all of his questions first time (he spoke not a syllable of English), he was either a very good actor or he was fully comprehending my answers as well. Suddenly he motioned for me to follow, led me over towards the houses (I thought I was going to meet his wife, and was preparing some witty anecdotes to amuse her), down an alley, and we emerged onto a back street where a Sunday market was in progress. I was presented, in much the same way that a comic-book savage might present a captured missionary, to the townsfolk, given a tour of a fascinating Japanese retro-artifacts store, and then led back through the admiring but disquietingly silent crowd. Before farewelling me, he handed me a cake (as in a full-sized cake like your grandma might bake) and then, from another stall, a bag of doughnut-shaped things that tasted like shortbread. I don’t know if he paid for them or if he was some kind of village headman with the power to help himself to the town produce, but I went on my way with both breakfast and lunch taken care of.

It was hot for the second day running yesterday — we’re not in Hokkaido anymore, Toto. So again in the afternoon I found a way off the road, down through the scrub and bamboo to the river’s edge for lunch and a swim. Since I’ve been in the same unwashed clothes for nearly two weeks, and the smell emanating from my wretched frame is strong enough to repel flies, I dived in fully clothed to kill two birds (and a lot of innocent fish) with one stone. Walking on, I had almost dried off within an hour and stopped at a weird, rundown-looking shack with vending machines and a soft-serve ice-cream machine. I’m sitting on the sidewalk having a drink when a boy from the shop comes over, says “Douzo,” — Here you are — and hands me an ice-cream. His plump, rural-looking mother, or grandmother, or great-grandmother, is standing in the doorway watching and smiling. The ice-cream was a strange brown flavour, maybe coffee, and when I finished she was still standing in the doorway.

“Thank you,” I said, “It was delicious.”

“It was delicious, was it?”

“Er…yes. It…was,” and I bid her farewell.

I approached Kochi at last — or at least the outskirts of Kochi, a town called Nankoku. Yesterday was a 37km-day for me, and my leg didn’t trouble me at all. But there was a long, boring descent through a mountain pass, down endless sweeping switchbacks, walking against the flow of Golden Week-Sunday drivers and Sunday driver’s wives staring at me with the usual palpable bewilderment as they zoomed homeward, wherever that might be. I pulled into a fruit-and-vegetable store which had a bumper crop of grapefruit piled all over the footpath and a dearth of customers buying any. The lady shopkeeper asked me the usual questions, and I hit her with one of mine: “Is there a campground around here?” (hoping that, just once, I might get a “Camp in our backyard” response.). Some discussion ensued with her husband; the consensus was “no”. But he mentioned a parking lot behind the next michi-no-eki (”road station” - a rest area/store for drivers), behind which there was a certain patch of grass… I bought one of those Japanese watermelon-sized apples — all the cheap white bread has done irreparable harm to my intestines — and as I hauled on the pack, he passed me two tomatoes for the road. What a day.

I continued my descent in an uncharacteristically sunny frame of mind, hit level ground at last, bought a beer at the first convenience store in over a week, drank it in three gulps, and moved on till I found the road station — and that lovely patch of grass. I camped there after the last family had split, and in the morning a homeless guy was sleeping nearby on one of the tables. I said good morning and he stared at me in inpassive silence. Then I remembered the lesson of Kobo Daishi, decided it was time to return some of that generosity, and handed him some coins. He remarked, with obvious surprise and perhaps just a hint of gratitude, “Umphhh!”  Walking through a very pleasant rain — it was barely 6:00am but it had been almost too hot to sleep – I found temple # 29 on the 88-temple pilgrimage circuit, a wonderful old place called Kokubunji. A few early-morning pilgrims turned up in white clothes and conical hats under their umbrellas. As I once lived in Kokubunji, Tokyo, for over two years (there are Kokubunjis all over Japan), I considered finding this one, my first pilgrimage temple, a really good omen.

My plan now is to see the city, and especially the castle, find somewhere to wash these stinking rags, and then ramble on via a few other temples to the headwaters of the Shimanto River and down to its mouth, then up the western coast of Ehime towards Matsuyama. I’ve had enough of mountains for a while and want to see some coastline, but I’ll try to climb Ishizuchi-San en route. And as I walk, perhaps I’ll remember, now and then, to chant Dougyou ninin — “two travelling together” — the mantra repeated by pilgrims as they retrace the Daishi’s circuit of the island. Quite frankly, I could use a little company once in a while.

My first sight of the Sata peninsula, from the ferry on my way across Kinko Bay, was not inspiring. It was raining, and getting dark, and I had no idea how I was going to get down the 30km stretch of road to the southern tip of Kyushu, my official start point. There were no buses heading south on a Saturday evening. So I started walking south. I stopped at the first kombini, and bought some alcohol to drink when I reached Cape Sata. I was going to get a flask of scotch, but opted for the can of chu-hi instead. It was lighter. Ian would’ve nodded his approval.

About an hour out of town, I came across the Ohama Seaside Park, a name perhaps grander than the little beach deserved. The sign said there were campsites, so I decided to stop. I still don’t know where those campsites are; the park was so narrow that I ended up setting up my tent on the track leading from the carpark out to the rocks, and hoping the wind wouldn’t get any worse. As I was doing so, a man approached and invited me to join him and his friend under one of the only rotundas. I didn’t need much convincing.

The two of them (they never did tell me their names) were fishermen sleeping in their little white cars at night and fishing from the rocks during the day. One of them was from Honshu, on a three-week holiday from his job and his wife. He was probably the most down-to-earth Japanese man I’ve ever met. He was short and middle-aged, with large, thick-rimmed glasses he kept pushing up, and wearing old, rumpled overalls. He had a doberman called Taro, which also lived in his car and barked ferociously at anyone who walked past. I doubt anything would’ve surprised him. When I told him my plans to walk the length of Japan, he nodded slowly, and then asked me if I wanted some alcohol.

Shochu, from the area, he explained. “My roots are here, somewhere,” he said. “I was an orphan, so I don’t know my family, but my grandparents were from these parts.”

He poured me a glass of shochu, and I was introduced to Taro, who slobbered all over me. He liked getting scratched behind the ears — so much so that he bit my arm and pulled it to him whenever I stopped. Hoping to distract him, I fed him a pizza chip, and shortly after Taro was vomiting great brown mounds of stuff up on the grass. His owner calmly scooped it up with a couple of paper plates as it came out and ferried it to the plastic bag hanging off the back of his car. “Sorry -” I began, but he cut me off with a casual wave, and we were soon drinking again.

His companion was a tall, skinny man, whose nervous energy made you keep one eye on him in case he pulled out a knife. He peppered me with questions, most of which I didn’t understand, and got me to pose for his phone camera. With all the seriousness of a professional, he got the shot of me with and without glasses, with and without my bandana, the one stroking my beard, the one of me looking out to sea, the one looking directly into the camera, and so on. Finally, when the light had completely faded, he was satisfied, and we continued drinking in darkness. The rain got heavier, and I moved around to their side of the table, where it was drier.

The three of us sat in a row and drank, eating salted green beans. The questions continued, but as before I couldn’t make out a word the skinny man was saying — in fact, I had a hard time recognising the language as Japanese. He began to get frustrated by my lack of comprehension, and even to suspect I understood more than I was letting on.

“He doesn’t understand what you’re saying,” his friend finally interrupted. “I’m Japanese, and even I don’t understand half of what you’re saying.” He turned to me. “He’s difficult to understand, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“See?” exclaimed the skinny one, slamming his palm on the picnic table. “He does understand! You speak fluently!”

And so it continued. I, in turn, began to suspect he was completely drunk, or slightly retarded. It turned out he was both. After sending him away for the third time to get some water, his more sober friend leaned in.

“Okashi,” he whispered conspiratorily, tapping his head.

“Is that so?” I asked.

“Mm. Okashi.”

He was thoughtful for a while, then poured us both some more shochu.

“So where are you going to stay on your walk?”

“In my tent, mostly.”

“Be careful of the police.”

“Really? Why?”

“Camping: dame (dah-meh). Even sleeping in cars at the beach: dame,” he said, gesturing at his own car. “But camping: dame. The police don’t like it. And you’re a foreigner. Gaijin: dame, dame!” And he cross his two index fingers for emphasis. I never thought I’d hear those words from a Japanese person.

Just then wheels squeeled, and a little white car careened past, with Taro in hot pursuit. The doberman was barking and throwing himself at the front wheels of the car, which was weaving erratically from side to side.

“Taro-chan! Taro-chan!” His owner leapt up and joined the chase: car, dog, and human racing down the road in the rain. I was left with the alcohol. The car stopped. The reverse lights came on, and then the car was going just as fast as before, with dog and man chasing again. The car stopped at the rotunda and the skinny man opened the door. “Get your dog,” he grumbled. “It’s dangerous!” he said, completely oblivious to the irony. Once Taro-chan was safely restrained, he took off again, and managed to get out of the carpark without crashing.

“Where’s he gone?”

His friend shrugged. “No idea.”

A little while later he returned, bearing a case of shochu, each bottle as big as a wine bottle. “A present,” he declared, putting the case on the table. Take your pick.”

Just what I needed: more alcohol. “Oh, no, I couldn’t really…”

But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and chose a bottle for me.

“It’s a present,” his friend said, as if to say I had no choice in the matter. He went to open it, but I stopped him. He looked surprised, until I explained: “I have to walk 30km tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s right.” We both sobered up a little at the thought, and I soon said goodnight, took my bottle of shochu (hefting it dubiously), and crawled into my tent.

“In the morning, make sure you get a photo of Taro-chan to send to Australia,” he called after me.

***

The next morning I woke to find the two fishermen already out on the rocks, Taro asleep in the car, and a very expensive camera with zoom lens sitting on the footpath. I took a photo of it as an example of what people will leave lying around in Japan (I don’t know another country where you could do that and return expecting to find it). It’s owner returned soon enough from the toilets, and introduced himself as Mr Mekuno. His English wasn’t bad.

“I heard you on the ferry. You’re walking from Sata? Follow me, please.”

I did, and realised he was offering me a lift to the Cape, which I gratefully accepted. Mekuno-san was a retired maths teacher who looked younger than he was. When I asked if he was on holiday, he replied in English with a broad smile: “I’m 70; I’m free!” He was from Otsu, and was spending his retirement going on long driving trips. His car was full of belongings, and it took him five minutes to clear a space in the front seat for me. I had time to notice the stickers covering his car, place names from every corner of Japan — including Cape Soya, my ultimate destination. Before we started, he took out a little notebook and recorded the odometer and time to the nearest minute. The notebook was thick with numbers. Then he checked the GPS navigation system on the dashboard, and we were off.

“Have you been to Sata before?” I asked.

“Yes, this is my third time. The first two times with my wife. She died six years ago, so I’m lonely now. I go driving.”

We were silent for a while, then I asked him what his favourite places in Japan were.

“Fuji-san and Yari-ga-take.”

I told him I planned to climb Yari-ga-take.

“Yes, you must be careful.” And he made me promise to find out the rescue service number for the mountain before I climbed it. He chuckled: “But, lots of money.”

He asked me a few questions about Australia, then asked me if I knew how the kangaroo got its name. He told me the story of how Captain Cook had pointed at the strange animal and said something, to which the Aboriginal replied: ‘I don’t understand.’

“I love this story,” he continued chuckling. “‘Kangaroo.’ I don’t understand. It’s very funny, don’t you think?”

Just before we reached the Cape, the navigation stopped, and Mekuno-san got out to change the CD in the boot. As we arrived at the carpark, he asked me if I was going to write a book of my walk. I explained how Ian and I were going to write a book with intercutting chapters leading up to meeting in the middle, followed by the two of us tracing each other’s footsteps, so the reader got two perspectives of the same place in two different seasons. He was excited to hear about it, and gave me his card, making me promise to write to him when the book came out. His card featured a portly, colourfully dressed cartoon of him drawn by two of his students.

Mekuno-san bought entrance tickets for the two of us, and made sure I stamped mine with the date. We took photos of each other standing on the headland looking out to the lighthouse, and trying not to get blown off the observation tower.

“OK, goodbye,” he said suddenly. “Good luck.” And he vanished, leaving me on the headland by myself. Lucky I gave him that bottle of shochu, I thought. (”21 percent: not good to drive!” he’d laughed.)

I took a few more photos, then turned north and started walking. I found myself humming the tune to “One billion green bottles”. Despite the rain, I was happy. At least, I was until I discovered my fuel pump had broken, and leaked fuel through my bag. And — perhaps for the first time — I began to realise that 3500km is a bloody long way.

I crossed the bridge, keeping well clear of the perilously low handrail with the perilously long drop to the rocky riverbed below, and almost missed the tiny, hand-painted sign pointing up a narrow mountain road: ‘Chiiori’. This was a real find. It was Day 8 - it was yesterday - and I knew the famous 300-or-so-year-old thatched-roof farmhouse was somewhere in the area, but I had forgotten about it after making a vague internet inquiry from Nagoya just before leaving for Shikoku. I didn’t have to think twice. I just spun left and started climbing. Yesterday was my longest day, mileage-wise, in a week (a relatively tame 25km to that point) and it was about to get a little longer. There ensued an hour of hard walking for 7km or so up a steep collection of switchbacks, alternating between dark cedar forest and the open slopes of tiny hill farms overlooking the deep river valley - deepest in Japan - below. The day was getting on and level ground is at a premium in Shikoku, especially this part of Shikoku. I wanted a bed, my first in a week, but I really wanted to see Chiiori. I came to a lovely thatched house (I found out later that the owners have government funding for its upkeep) - but the wrong one. I asked three beautiful old obaasan labouring in their plots, with a combined tooth count of about 7, if I was going the right way, and of all their elaborate and incomprehensible replies understood only asoko (”over there”) and something about a big tree. There were lots of big trees. I kept climbing, past a pen of hairy wild boars that snuffled inquisitively at the wire fence. All the while, I walked fast, complimenting myself as I strode and climbed: What a fine specimen of a man you are, Mountaingoat. Look at you go - not even tired, and no pain at all. And just a fortnight ago you could barely stand upright. Hokkaido be damned, this is the place for a rugged fellow like you. There’s power in those accursed limbs of yours yet. If only some fine young farm maiden could see you now and admire those extraordinary calf muscles…

I was near the top, surely, of the hill, when I saw the second sign, just as modest as the first, and found my way down through the garden terraces, around the front of the old house with the gaps showing in the thatch that’s due for another (expensive) thatch job very soon, and to a welcome from one of the two men congratulating themselves on finally uprooting a tree stump they’d been prying at all day.

“Mountaingoat?” Yup. A handshake from Paul, the manager, an introduction to Tom, the young volunteer visiting from England on his gap year, a glass of much-appreciated water, a tour of the beautiful interior with its creaking floorboards and smoke-blackened posts and ceiling. Later two more guests were dropped off by taxi, Jez and Stef, a very nice English couple enjoying a rural sojourn after a Japan tour by Jez’s rock band, Farrah. Jez had beer, as British rock musicians often do, and after making short work of them, while the rice got cooking, we piled into another taxi and the farm truck for a half-hour excursion down those winding narrow roads to an onsen hotel with a funicular railway that takes bathers to the hot spring high on the hill. Later, after a great meal, out came the futons, and I slept at last under that blackened ceiling I’d read so much about.

Yesterday was Day 8 for me in Shikoku, and I was all the more delighted that it finished so well, because the morning was the first really bad time I’ve had on this leg (no pun intended) of the trip. I’d climbed Tsurugi-San, Waypoint # 15, two days before and taken a zero the following day at the campground near a couple of the famous vine bridges. I was bored for most of my day off - nothing to do but wash clothes, eat and sit in the sun - and was really excited about heading west along Rt 438 deeper into the mythic Iya Valley. But almost immediately I was disappointed. The river that is the soul of this ancient valley had been trashed, utterly brutalised, by the plague of engineers that has ruined so much of rural Japan, and their work, it seemed, had hardly begun. Every bend in the road revealed greater brutality, and the anger in me grew into fury. The concrete fetishists were using their pork barrel tax money to reduce much of the river bed to a series of descending steps, to install spillovers at regular intervals, to pave the banks and divert and desecrate and deform this once-beautiful waterway. And above the river and the road, whole hillsides cleared of their tree cover and coated with concrete or even worse, the awful latticework of cement used to stabilise degraded slopes in this country. Earthmoving equipment, piles of rusty pipes and coils of PVC piping at every convenient roadside space. Men in hardhats toiling on bridges and in riverbed and high, high above the river on bobcats. To do this to any river is a crime, to do it to this one is particularly heinous. I walked within a dark and boiling cloud, visualising firing squads in town squares where engineers, architects and construction workers, local politicians and their crooked cronies stepped up to take their turn before my one-man vengeance unit. And the haiku I’d been writing as I walked for diversion and while resting my leg took on a decidedly harsh and political tone. In fact I think I invented a new poetic sub-genre, the eco-crusader haiku:

The Iya Valley,

Engineered to perfection,

Engineered to death.

River, remember

When your waters made music

Of boulders and sand?

A crack in the wall

And a trickle of water

Like an escapee.

It stifles its cries

And sobs quietly downstream,

The river of tears.

It was one of those mornings you sometimes have when you’re walking alone through a strange land, with no diversion to soothe you, no way of adequately releasing the turmoil roiling within. Happily such days, I’ve found, are usually supplanted by unexpected compensation. It was ironic that I should have ended up at Chiiori after such a day of displeasure, because Chiiori’s owner, the author Alex Kerr, has described in two books, Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons, his own ideological battles with the forces of greed and stupidity besetting Japan. Sitting on the floor around an open fire last night (smoky fires are crucial for the preservation of the thatch above), high in the still-wonderful hills with good people, reminded me of what I love about Japan and journeys like this, and fortunately I have an illogical hope that within my lifetime Japanese popular sentiment, and who knows, perhaps some political will, will mature enough to allow some of this vandalism to be reversed. Iya is often called the Tibet of Japan. Well, I say, “Free the Iya Valley!”

Pancakes are on the stove. I must leave the ‘office’ (a little shed down the bottom of the garden) soon to partake, before another session in the garden and a return to the rigours of the road. Before I go, here’s how things stand. My leg has been good, mostly, though Tsurugi gave it a bit of a beating. No agony, no occasions when I just couldn’t move another step. No painkillers in my life now, except for two after Tsurugi, and my pace is leisurely and sensible. I aim to explore the vine bridge below and then the Oboke Gorge before moving west towards Ishizuchi-San, highest point in western Japan. And leg permitting, I think I will head south then into Kochi and southern Ehime prefectures. Shikoku means “Four Provinces” and I will then have seen some of all four. My new goal, all the more pressing after yesterday’s experience, is to find the headwaters of the Shimanto River, last undammed (and undamned) river in the country, and follow it to the ocean, then maybe go up the western coast to Matsuyama, across to Hiroshima and thence back to Tokyo and home. Hokkaido slaughtered my finances as well as my body, and there is some serious illness in my family back home. It looks like walking all of Japan will have to wait for now, though I am confident Chris can more than compensate for my failure.

Meanwhile, Shikoku awaits!

~ GOAT

* Flickr pictures and a summary of my walk so far coming soon, technology permitting. I have not even had a working phone since arriving here, and internet cafes - don’t make me laugh…

I don’t remember exactly when or how the Japan bug first bit. I suspect that, as with a lot of male westerners who end up in Japan, it all started with Samurai. I remember enjoying some old repeats of a black-and-white Samurai TV drama when I was still in primary school; I can see myself sitting in the backyard studying the pictures in a library book about Samurai history: castles, armour, lots of bloodshed. I remember a long Christmas school holiday (six weeks seemed like an eternity) when I did my own (unassigned and unrequired) school project using one of those little project kits you used to be able to buy at newsagents. My chosen topic: Japan. (As I said, six weeks was a long time, and I was, I think, a pretty weird kid.) Japan seemed to epitomise, for a boy who did a lot of reading and whose favourite books were the abridged versions of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe — still, in their unabridged forms, among my favourites — a string of remote and exotic islands rich in history and mystery at the farthest edge of the real world. I remember memorising the names of the four main islands, north to south (okay, east to west), but I didn’t know how to pronounce them, and Shikoku became “SHICK-oh-koo” and Kyushu “Kai–OO-shoo”.

For some reason, even then, “SHICK-oh-koo” was my favourite.

Later, in high school, it was Yukio Mishima who transported me back to those exotic isles, with Spring Snow, the first volume in his Sea of Fertility series. I wasted years on German as my second- language subject, when Japanese would have come in very handy years later. At university I studied film and discovered Kurosawa and Rashomon and of course The Seven Samurai; I had a Japanese girlfriend for a short while (which didn’t endear me to my grandfather, who had fought in New Guinea) but I still didn’t entertain any ideas of coming here. It wasn’t until many years later that unemployment and the horrible breakdown of a long-term relationship drove me, or flew me, over New Guinea and the Equator, to Tokyo, to a tiny apartment among fields of shallots and broccoli, to a new and problematic career path in a now-disgraced language-school chain, to further serial romantic disaster, to the eventual disillusionment that grips most romantics when confronted with the real, and to the mountains where I found at last something permanent and solid to absorb my restless energy.

You know where that obsession has landed me lately. Hokkaido, where I renewed my old acquaintance with severe pain, and where my big plans for a rather comprehensive excursion through those four isles seemed to have met a very premature demise. And now Nagoya, where I’ve spent almost a week recuperating in a rented apartment, and the latest episode of my serial romantic disasters. Defeated, disspirited, I had a bus ticket booked to Tokyo, and was on the verge of changing the date of my return flight to Australia. Then something happened that made me cancel the bus ticket, buy a new one, and put the phone call to Qantas on hold. It’s been sunny and beautiful here in Nagoya. On the TV weather report last night they showed the first cherry blossoms in Sapporo, weeks early — the cherries I’d hoped to meet as I headed south-west through Hokkaido. I was walking to the post office a few days ago, a long walk, and I thought, “Perfect walking weather. Wish I was hiking.”  Then I realised that my leg wasn’t hurting. Not much anyway. It had been nearly eight days since I left the road and last donned the monster pack. I’d read Chris’s latest post and Craig’s updates and found myself stricken with something far worse than physical pain: jealousy. Apart from the suffering, I’d really enjoyed my two weeks in Hokkaido. So I did some research and talked myself into another lunatic scheme.

Shikoku.

My hero Alan Booth bypassed the island completely on his famous walk:

Most visitors to Japan and even most Japanese travellers do likewise. Occasional tourists give her a quick look in passing:

I want to see her from a somewhat more intimate perspective. I have abandoned for now all thought of walking the whole country and ticking off damned Waypoints. If I can pull this off I can go home in not too much disgrace, and I can see the ‘forgotten’ isle, least visited and populated of the four main islands, whose odd shape and sheltered position, tucked away on the Inland Sea between Kyushu, where ‘Japan’ started, and the protective belly of Honshu, where it took on its most familiar forms, have long fascinated me. Any more will be a bonus. Once the idea took hold it would not let go, and yesterday I got the bus into town and came home with this:

Abandon all common sense, ye who climb aboard the 11pm Takamatsu-bound bus. You might think I’m crazy, after all that agony I’ve described in these ‘pages’, and you might be proven right, but I am not ready to quit. Not yet. It’s taken too much time, money and planning — okay, dreaming — and too many days in classrooms of the damned paying for it, to quit just yet. Pain be damned, I came here to walk. I haven’t seen a doctor — can’t afford one, and I was told that any X-rays or scans would be a long time coming. Anyway, a doctor would just prescribe further rest. I’ll rest when I’m dead.

My very vaguely planned route will take me into the mountainous centre, to Tsurugi-san and Ishizuchi-san, and up to Matsuyama. However, if I am blessed with an agony-free journey, I’d love to explore the south-western corners of Ehime and Kochi as well. The last undammed river in Japan is down there:

I am not deluding myself that Mr Payne won’t be back to say hi. If he becomes too overbearing I will admit defeat and find a way out of there while I can still walk. But I hope that with sensible (low) mileages and lots of rest stops, I can avoid a repeat performance of Hokkaido. My leg no longer hurts at all when I move it in bed at night; I haven’t taken any painkillers for several days. And I have a secret weapon. Here is Monkey VI, the great fat bastard, back in Tokyo before I started:

And here is Monkey V, the pack I always planned to replace her with once I reached more forgiving climes:

I can just about halve the weight I was lugging before. I am sending home the pack, the enormous winter sleeping bag (my goose-down bag packs up smaller and lighter than a football), the rabbit-fur hat (I’ll miss it; it served me well), a lot of clothes, and maybe even my stove (I found in Hokkaido that I was usually too tired to cook at night, too cold to cook in the morning; I can subsist if not thrive on bread and peanut butter, bananas, crackers, cheese, chocolate and kombini fare). A box of replacement gear from Tokyo should arrive here today — thanks, Martine. Ed Abbey the stuffed goat is still coming. We’ve been through too much together for me to abandon him as excess weight.

One last thing. Chris doesn’t know I’m back on the road yet. He’s boucing along somewhere in Kyushu, chuckling, whistling, listening to lectures on abnormal psychology and particle physics on his iPod, hungry for triumph and glory. Let’s not spoil the surprise. If my body doesn’t fail me again, if the dwindling funds hold out, I look forward to the day I can emerge from the hills or the rice paddies, walk up to him on some dusty backroad and say, “Dr Lynch, I presume?”

* The picture of Booth-san is VERY rare (the only one I’ve ever seen), and the book cover shown is from the first edition. They were copied from a magazine article Booth wrote soon after his book was published, a copy of which was given to me by a fellow fan back in Tokyo.

** And happy Earth Day, everyone! I love this planet!

~ GOAT

What’s it going to be? The latest must-have gear for the mileage-conscious hiker?

Something a bit more traditional for the walker on a tight budget?

It’s not really hiking if you use wheels, is it?  Wheels are for sissies.

Perhaps some rest, and the services of a good health professional?

Or a good veterinarian?

Maybe, contrary to what society has always been telling us, drugs really are the answer?

Or maybe there’s something he’s not telling us. Not yet, anyway. Wouldn’t want to jinx himself, would he? Best to be cautious.

Stay tuned…

~ GOAT

Unrelenting rain, storms, gloomy days, and unreliable equipment have meant this solar-powered hiker has been incommunicado for much of the first few weeks walking Japan. If you’ve been checking the photos on Flickr, you’ll have found a few updates from me on those rare moments I’ve had power and phone reception, such as on the top of a mythological volcano in Kagoshima.

Yesterday, on Day 13 from Cape Sata, I found a free campground next to an onsen, and today had my first bath in two weeks — in the fish pond. It’s a beautiful day, blue skies and a hot sun, the first full day of sunshine I’ve had on Kyushu, and I lay washed clothes and the rest of my gear out on a wooden deck to dry out. Suitably refreshed and dressed again in (relatively) clean and DRY clothes, I can now pick up where I left off — down south on a jungle island. Much has happened since, as you probably know.

From Iriomote-jima, I caught a ferry back to Ishigaki, then a plane to Okinawa. At the ferry terminal buying my ticket to Kagoshima city, I met Martin, a British writer about to hitch-hike my route from Cape Sata to Cape Soya, and as it turned out, getting the very same ferry the next day. Back at the guesthouse that night (a sort of Japanese commune called “B.A.S.E.”), I met Shiou, a Taiwanese cyclist who has just finished the second leg of a six month tour of Japan. Small world. Cycling between 10 and 150km a day, Shiou has cycled about 10,000km around Japan over two three month trips. I picked his brains, and his highlights were western Hokkaido, Shikoku, Aso-san (my first waypoint), and Yaku-shima, my next attempt at hiking a Japanese island.

Yaku-shima was the first place in Japan to be given World Heritage status (strangely, as recently as 1993, which perhaps explains the genuine pride several Japanese people took in informing me of its accolade). Like Iriomote-jima, I’d been looking forward to Yaku-shima, for it combines three of my favourite things: mountains, forests, and mysterious islands. A near-perfect circle, the volcanic island is 25km in diameter. A couple of more ferry rides later, and I was there. It was downpouring, and late in the day, but after Iriomote-jima and delays in Kagoshima getting my phone sent away to be fixed I was keen to head into the mountains. Getting my fuel cannister filled at the petrol station, I told the attendants about my plans to cross the island, and then the rest of Japan. But it’s pouring rain, they said. The river will be flooded, and you won’t be able to cross. Ikinai. But I wasn’t going to be deterred a second time, so with a look at each other that said more than words, they wished me gambatte, and I headed into the rain.

***

A strange face
in the rainforest:
a macaque!

Less than 20 metres away, padding along a fallen log, my first wild monkey. I’d camped at a shelter near the first waterfall after walking for only a couple of hours. It had been slow-going in the wet, and I was tired from the unfamiliar weight of my full pack. (Sickness in the two months before the walk, and the slow acquisition of gear after each pay day, meant I was nowhere near as prepared for this walk as Ian was. But that’s always been the way I’ve jumped in the deep end — completely unprepared.) Night was falling, and I was cooking my first meal on my stove, soba noodles and meat sauce. The rain had eased off, and a few stars had even appeared through the dripping foliage. I could hear the roar of the waterfall, and the eerie sounds of the forest. I’d assumed they were all insects at first, but on spotting the macaque I realised I was surrounded by a troop of monkeys. I only saw the one, briefly. They called to each other for a while, then melted into the night. I felt alone, and free. The scale of what I was attempting was intimidating and intoxicating.

The next few days were brutally beautiful. Yaku-shima soars up from sub-tropical rainforest to sub-alpine vegetation on the summits; it was a microcosm of my walk across Japan. The main reason for its World Heritage status is its old-growth cedar forests, and they were stunning. Many individual trees were named, and thousands of years old. The island was the inspiration for the Miyazaki animation Princess Mononoke, and I can see why. Giant trees, the forest floor littered with the enormous trunks of the fallen, tangled roots weathered like driftwood, and frequent coppicing, new generations growing on top of the stumps of the old, and everything encrusted in moss. Fantastic shapes everywhere: faces, serpents, petrified octopus kings, the skulls of long extinct reptiles, the bodies of sleeping ents — all slumped against each other like the victims of some magical Pompeii. The deer, unafraid of humans, added to the spell.

I passed through different kinds of forests, and marshes, usually in the rain, always up, up, up. When I finally reached the peak of Miyanoura-dake, the highest in southern Japan at 1935m, I was in everlasting fields of sasa, bamboo grass, walking on rock through trenches formed by feet and water. At times the trenches became a raised path above the bog; at other times tunnels so deep it seemed the sasa was going to swallow me entirely. And rocks: huge boulders sitting on the tops of the rolling hills like Easter Island statues. Everything was shrouded in cloud. A gale was blowing, and I was almost blown off the peak taking a self-portrait. Eerie places, the tops of mountains. They awaken a primitive awe in me, the kind that whispers that this is a place where people die. I descended as quickly as I could, whipped by rain, just the sound of the wind, my breath inside my jacket hood, breathing in and out, and the “tick, tock” of my sticks on bare wet rock. On the way down I saw the skeletons of trees, some looking like electrocuted Christmas trees, the oldest ones reduced to a single talon pointing at the sky.

That night, in the mountain hut, I met a Japanese hiking writer and a photographer on assignment for a hiking magazine. They shared a nip of Mitake shochu, an alcohol made from sweet potato and named after the “three peaks” we had scaled that day. I was wet and cold; it was good. I spent the next day with them, and we paid our respects at Jomon-sugi, the grandfather of the forest at a girth of 28m, and said to be more than 7200 years old. As we stood there taking in, a deer came out from behind the tree and posed before it, for all the world like the spirit of the tree. Further down, at Wilson’s Stump, we stopped for lunch. The stump was incredible, large enough to hold a small shrine and a stream, with enough room left over to fit 50 people. In front of the shrine was an offering of Mitake shochu. My fellow hikers drew water from the stream and cooked a huge meal of noodles for the three of us. The pot kept getting refilled and reheated, and seemed bottomless.

Later that day, after walking for an hour down an abandoned railway cut into the side of a ravine, I parted ways with my new friends and continued my traverse. (If anyone can get a copy of “BE-PAL” magazine, I think I might be appearing in the June edition.) Another night in the forest, and then I headed down to the northern port of Miyanoura.

I’d crossed the sixth-largest island in the Japanese archipelago. The unfordable river? Easily rock-hopped. So now all I have to do is cross the four largest islands. Simple, really…

~Ashioto

p.s. It’s proving too time-consuming to add camera phone photos to my posts, so I think I’ll stick to text. Lots of photos on our Flickr page — the Yakushima folder has better photos from my camera anyway. Also Iriomote and Okinawa folders.

With every mile
Another piece of me peels off and whips down the road
All down the road
I should have left a long time ago… ~ Smog, ‘I Could Drive Forever’

The good news: I’m not sleeping in this internet-cafe booth tonight. I have a well-used cheapo business-hotel room, rank with the stenches of stale tobacco and a long winter’s kerosene, for around 30 bucks a night. It’s a bit of a trek for a man with what might be a permanet limp, but at least I won’t be kept awake by buzzing fluoro lights and the mysterious sounds coming from adjoining booths. And there’s breakfast for less than 300 yen. No Snickers bar as I hit the road tomorrow. No more roads to hit for a long while, if at all.

Which brings me to the bad news. I have quit the trail, or the road, and am back in Sapporo after a morning bus that covered in 20 minutes the 18km I spent all morning limping along as I neared Sounkyo, and then a train from Asahikawa back here to the home of the TV Tower and a certain popular beverage. I had already decided as I approached Sounkyo that even making it that far was a miracle and I should quit while I could still walk. On my last night before Sounkyo, even with a can of chu-hi in me to ward off the heebie-jeebies that visit when you stealth-camp among boarded-up holiday cottages in an abandoned auto-camping village, I couldn’t move my right leg inside the sleeping bag without the pain being so bad I had to give up trying to write in my journal and just lie deathly still. Last night, amid the luxurious quilts of a second night in a Japanese-style hotel, I was three times woken by a cramp in the right leg that I was unable to straighten without agonising pain. Yep. End of the road.

If you have given this site even a cursory glance — and if you’re reading this it’s fair to say that you have — you can understand that this decision hurts me somewhere just below the ribcage far more acutely than what I’ve endured around the right knee. The trip has consumed me since Chris and I first started talking about it a few years back. Walking is everything to me. It’s the one thing I like to pride myself on doing well. And I have not done well, not at all. My wretched, devious body always finds ways to thwart the schemes my mind comes up with. The pain started before I knocked off on Day 1 and hasn’t left me since. Lately the pattern has been: start walking with that morning Snickers (after it’s had time to thaw in a pocket via body heat) and the day’s first heavy-duty painkiller before 7:00am; get in a good 90 minutes — two hours if you’re lucky — of pain-free, glad-to-be-alive walking; stop for a rest; resume movement with the pain now alternating between bearable and excrutiating; collapse on the edge of a rice paddy or in a bus shelter with leg elevated while the next dose kicks in; endure a stop-start afternoon with mileages plummeting until it’s nearly dark and you have to find somewhere to put up a tent while the leg is hurting so bad you can’t think straight. And even with the evening dose, I’ll typically wake at least 20 times in the night and surrender at last to the inevitable by rising again before 4:30 to do it all over again.

Somehow, following this pattern, I managed to walk this far:

I haven’t worked out the distance yet but I would have covered it in half the time on the Appalachian Trail when my health was good. Most of the terrain has been beautifully level except for some mountainous roads early on. But I can’t imagine many people persisting after Day 1 with this kind of suffering, not with 15+ kilograms on their back, so I am perversely proud that I achieved this much. I think getting to Sounkyo was a miracle, and it was only my long-term and intimate relationship with pain that enabled me to make it there. This is the fourth episode of chronic, intense pain I’ve suffered while walking. On the AT in 2004 I started off with Compartment Syndrome, where the muscles swell up so much in their sheaths in your lower legs that the blood supply is cut off and you are jolted with pain so hard that you cry out. Later, after lying in a hut in mid-Pennsylvania for 11 days, I found out that the worsening pain I’d suffered for the previous 200 miles was stress fractures in both legs. Last year I became the only person I’ve heard of to circumnavigate Moreton Island, world’s second-largest sand island, via its beaches, two days and five hours of which only about two hours weren’t miserable — walking on sand is a nasty business. But you keep walking because you have no alternative and somehow your tolerance goes through the roof.

I just could not face another visit from the entity I’ve dubbed ‘Mr Payne’. I don’t mind it when he drops by, but I’m tired of him hanging around till I have to show him the door.

Somehow, while he was there, I still found a lot of pleasure and satisfaction in the empty heart of Hokkaido. After Furano I had a beautiful half-day when I really believed the rest and the leg brace were paying off. I passed through rolling hills of lavender and wine country and down deserted valleys of collapsing barns, knocked-together houses and roads so empty I went a complete hour before being passed by a single car. All the while the Daisetsuzan mountains loomed large on my right, with mighty Tokachi-Dake, an active volcano, sending spiraling plumes of smoke into a clear blue sky. I entered rice country where all the paddies, so soon after winter, were dry and dusty and brown. Farm dogs continued to harass me, including in one case a two-legged mutt that dragged its sorry legless rear, encased in a  protective fertiliser bag, out to the road that had cost it two limbs in its eagerness to do me harm. I laughed out loud and got its owner to pose wtih it for a shot (see a future post). I knew how the bastard felt.

Clearing the sprawl of Asahikawa at last I lucked upon a bicyle path that followed the beautiful Ishikari River, Hokkado’s longest, and afforded me the dignity of crying in pain beyond the gaze of passing motorists. At last I entered the amazing deep gorge of Sounkyo and its hot-spring resort clinging to a tiny patch of almost-level ground beaneath the rocky battlements and beyond, towering Kurodake. Yesterday I allowed myself the luxury of a gondola ride part of the way up, over snow-covered territory I was meant to be hiking. I was relieved. Even with a good leg that would have been a tough climb.

Anyway, tomorrow night I take a 36-hour ferry ride south to recuperate with my girlfriend in Nagoya for a week. While there I hope to use her translation skills on a visit to a clinic and find out exactly what the problem is. I strongly suspect that, whatever the diagnosis, a long period of rest will be prescribed (along with, I hope, some kick-arse painkillers). But if it’s at all possible (my funds have almost dried up after all these hotels and all this transport), I will endeavour to get in some miles with lighter gear and summer pack down the bottom end of Japan. Don’t write me off yet.

When I get access to a computer that permits uploading (net cafes seem to outlaw it), I have a lot of what I think are pretty incredible pictures. All those roadside pauses to take the weight off the bad leg gave me plenty of opportunities to squeeze off a few shots.

And meanwhile, of course, Chris is — last I heard anyway — still mobile. Don’t let this put you off, Chris, but everything’s riding on your shoulders now. DON’T SCREW UP.

~ GOAT

Iriomote-jima has been called Japan’s last frontier, a remote island 1200km south of the mainland, with Japan’s only wild jungle. As soon as I read about it, I knew I had to go — no matter that, along with my next stop, Yakushima, the trip is costing me more than a third of my budget for the entire walk, all before I’ve even reached my official start point of Cape Sata, the southern tip of Kyushu. Ian thought I was crazy, and not just because of the mask and snorkel I’d managed to shove into my bulging pack in those last, manic, sleep-deprived hours in Tokyo. As it turns out, he might have been right…

Subtropical Iriomote-jima boasts one of the most diverse ecosystems in Japan. A stone throw from Taiwan, the second largest island in the Okinawan chain is the most southerly after a tiny island a few kilometres further south, and home to the yamaneko, or Iriomote wildcat. A round-eared, bushy-tailed, yellow and black cat about as big as a domestic cat, it is rarely seen — partly because as few as 80 remain. Twenty kilometres long by 30 kilometres wide, Iriomote-jima has two major rivers, including Urauchi-gawa, the longest in Okinawa-ken at 39km, and touted as something of a mini-Amazon. The start of the cross-island walk is several kilometres upstream and accessible only by buying a one-way ticket on a river cruise, followed by a short walk along a graded path to a waterfall. Beyond: a poorly marked trail full of leeches, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and wildcats, a trail notorious for hikers losing their way — and occasionally their life.

Getting to the trailhead wasn’t my only transport complication. Just getting to the island had been hard. A 5.50am flight from Tokyo to Okinawa was followed by a one-hour flight to the island of Ishigaki, home of Japan’s most southern city. As soon as I arrived, I knew I was in the tropics. The light was different — the colours seemed brighter — and people’s gardens were filled with familiar golden canes, hibiscus, impatiens, and crotons. And compared with Tokyo, it was a positively balmy 20 degrees. On the bus from the airport to the ferry port, I spotted the first rusty truck I’d seen in my six months in Japan.

A 40-minute ferry brought me to Iriomote-jima, but I then had another hour on a bus to get to the campground at Hoshisuna-no-hama, Star Sand Beach. In the gathering dusk, after 60-something hours on only four hours sleep, the yamaneko warning signs on the side of the road seemed like something from a dream. After months of preparation, I was finally here. It didn’t take long for things to start going wrong. I realised I’d left my toothbrush in Tokyo, and after setting up camp on the grassy hill overlooking the beach, and sending Ian a photo, my phone died.

I slept soundly that night.

The next day, I rose late and spent the day relaxing. I re-organised my pack, wandered the little beach taking photos, and my much-derided mask and snorkel came in handy when I spent a couple of happy hours snorkelling around the offshore isles. The fluorescent blue fish darting among the coral reminded me of the diving I did last year in Papua New Guinea, in my hometown of Madang. A wizened old lady in a beach-side stall was selling brown shells identical to the one I wear around my neck. She also sold little glass bottles of “star sand”, the tiny skeletons of the marine organisms which give the beach its name.
Looking out into the Pacific Ocean, under the endless blue sky, it felt like the edge of Japan. For dinner, I had a huge bowl of Yaeyama soba in the cafe overlooking the beach. Life was good. I almost enjoyed the piano version of “Chariots of Fire” playing in the background.

On the 27th, I got up early for the 18km walk through the interior. It was going to be a hard day: the first river boat didn’t leave until 9am, and the last bus from the end of the trail was at 4.50pm. If I missed the bus, I wouldn’t get the first ferry in the morning, which would mean missing my return flight to Okinawa. (As it was, I was cutting it fine. The first ferry got in only 15 minutes before check-in closed, and the airport was a 10 minute drive by taxi — via an ATM to pay for the taxi, assuming I’d been paid.)

With much anticipation, and a gingerbread man for breakfast, I set off for the river wharf, a 3km walk further down Iriomote-jima’s only road. The mountains above were little more than 450m high, but their sheer sides and dense vegetation made them impressive.

The ticket-seller didn’t speak English. “One ticket, please,” I said in Japanese.

“Return, or one-way?” she asked.

“One-way,” I replied.

“Just one person?”

I nodded.

“Ikinai.”

“What?”

“You can’t go,” she repeated bluntly. “One person can’t go alone.”

It hit me in the stomach. What do you mean? I tried to argue, but she had the habitual scowl of all gatekeepers, and wasn’t for turning. She showed me the police declaration form for hikers and simply kept repeating that I needed a guide. I asked where I could find one, but she either didn’t understand my attempt at a fairly simple question, or wouldn’t answer. Finally, in exasperation, I tried English: “So where can I find a guide then?”

“I can call someone, if you like,” she said, in perfectly good English.

A guide, it turned out, would cost ¥30,000, plus two tickets for the boat (¥3000). As we’d been talking, the first boat had left; even if I could afford a guide, we wouldn’t be going until the next day. There was nothing for it: I put down my money.

“Okay. Return.”

She smiled tightly and gave me my ticket. I seriously considered just going anyway, and taking my chances with the police. But while being on the run from the Japanese police in the mountains of a remote jungle island while simultaneously searching for an endangered species does have a certain appeal — okay, a lot of appeal — I reluctantly decided that it would probably not be the best start to a 3500km journey across Japan. Especially considering the stories I’ve heard from a few gaijin now about being harrassed by bored rural police officers.

So we went on a short cruise up the river, the driver giving the daytripppers a runnning commentary on the seven species of mangroves growing in the brown, silty water, and cracking jokes about the yamaneko, the mere mention of which caused a dozen zoom lenses to be trained on the bank, to no avail. The winding river narrowed, and then I put on my pack for a two-hour return hike to the waterfall — the driver checking with me what time I’d be back.

Despite the disappointment, I enjoyed the walk, the first with my pack, and through a deeply familar ecosystem, the subtropical rainforest. I soon left the daytrippers behind and had the forest to myself. On the way back, I passed some daytrippers from the following boat. One of the women gasped to see someone alone in the wild jungle. “Just one person?” she said, amazed. I nodded, stepping aside to let a couple of little girls skip past.

“SUGOI!” she exclaimed.

“Not really,” I said.

And so I didn’t get across Iriomote-jima, or see a wildcat. But I did go snorkelling, and I did make my flight to Okinawa. And I was reminded that if I was going to get through this walk with patience intact, I was going to have to learn to be flexible.

~Ashioto

It’s been a hard four days but not without its joys and rewards. I am in Furano, population 26,000, famous in Japan for lavender production and skiing, and situated at the geographical centre of the great icy wedge of land called Hokkaido. Today, Day 5, I am taking an unplanned zero — ie, not walking anywhere further than absolutely necessary, and leaving the pack behind when I do. I think I started too hard, fast and heavy on April 2, desperate to make up for the lost April Fool’s Day in Nemuro, too eager to start pounding my way through some serious mileage. It took me all day to clear the sprawl of shops and businesses spiralling out from Sapporo, and by the end of it I estimate I’d walked at least 40km and the pain on the outside of my right knee was moving from dim to alarming.

Since then it hasn’t left me and I’ve been reducing speed and mileages, taking more frequent breaks, and ditching expensive gear that isn’t justifying its inclusion in my pack. First to go were the ice-axe and the snowshoes. I dumped them under an overpass near Mikasa on Day 2, and immediately felt the difference. I still had to swallow three heavy-duty painkillers a day to get me through to the night’s campsite, but I never regreted ditching the stuff. The walk is the important thing, I told myself; details can be rearranged (as with my change of route) but I can’t do anything to jeopardise the walk. So I’m missing some crucial mountain snow gear — solution: don’t climb any dangerous snowy mountains. Right away I abandoned the original plan to do a few days in Daisetsuzan, including Naka-Dake, my first Waypoint. As people have been telling me, April in Daisetsuzan is still winter. I never felt really at ease with all the alpine stuff strapped to my pack anyway — I’m a hiker, not a climber. If truth be told, the nasty weather in Nemuro helped sway me as well. (My girlfriend told me a local interviewed on TV said he hadn’t seen anything like it in 70 years — ‘Bou Fuu Setsu’, they call it, which means ‘rough wind snow’). I lost my appetite for the pure white stuff. But I’ve endured every flavour of leg, knee and foot pain on long walks in the past, and I was kind of hoping to do without long-term agony this time around. It gets in the way of one’s enjoyment of the outdoors.

I haven’t had a chance to discuss this with Chris yet, but we agreed that if one person has to change a Waypoint, the other will do the same. At the moment I’m thinking of Sounkyou, a deep and apparently spectacular gorge at the edge of Daisetsuzan. I certainly did not want to think about climbing anything serious with a bad knee and 18kg on my back.

Next to go were the Stabilicers, the crampon-like things that attach to your soles for icy surfaces. I know they’re useful, but they weigh nearly a kilo — they went in a roadside pull-over area yesterday. Bingo: nearly three kilos saved. If you think I must be a rich ass to throw $600 worth of gear on the roadside, you’re way off. I had to borrow money off my girlfriend to stay in a 3,000-yen pension tonight. I didn’t have the cash to send the stuff home and my final payday is still four days away. I like to think there’s something wonderfully zen-like about ditching my worldly possessions as my pilgrimage unfolds.

I won’t depress you with the dark realms I’ve visited — or revisited — while shuffling along the verge (in more ways than one): the lonesome sighs, the self-recrimination, the fantasies of the Civil War veteran limping homeward with a bullet festering in his leg (What’s a Civil War veteran doing in Japan? Hey, it’s my delusion)… Yesterday I started the day pain- and painkiller-free for 90 beautiful minutes until it came flooding back, and today, not walking anywhere, it’s fine. My first bath in five days restored my spirits, I will eat and drink like a convenience- store king tonight, I will wash my fragrant clothes and sleep on a bed and start off tomorrow with modest goals and renewed optimism.

Because it hasn’t all been bad. Hokkaido so far has been as wild and remote as the Japanese like to imagine it is, all the more for me, utterly alone all day, a literal part of that wild, cold landscape of snow and river and forest that the motorists staring at me open-mouthed in amazement through the glass walls of their crazed chariots can only glimpse in passing. I have slept under a bridge (extremely overrated), in a deserted campground by a vast frozen lake in the shadow of a very realistic Tyranosaurus Rex, on snow overlooking a wild river, and last night on top of a mountain dotted with stone Buddhas and other benevolent deities. I have been cold most nights even within my (allegedly) minus-20 C bag and wearing every item of clothing I had. I have been snowed and rained on, barked at by every maniacal farm dog in the valley, I have braved countless high bridges with low rails, and scurried ratlike through a terrifying 2,730-metre tunnel. It’s been quite a journey, and it’s barely begun.

Chris texted me last night while I huddled in my tent on the holy mountain. He was getting drunk with fishermen on a beach north of Cape Sata, a couple of thousand miles south, and it’s great to know we are both finally doing what we came here to do. Our expedition has always been unorthodox. Let’s see what else we can do to make it a little more so.