A couple of the Wakayama port towns we’ve walked through in the last week, Yuasa and Kii-Katsuura, have been remarkable for their stillness. As towns go, they’re purported to be functioning. Yuasa is famous for the discovery and manufacture of soy sauce; Kii-Katsuura for its tuna fishing. But when we wandered the streets, nothing was observably going on. Yuasa…
Author: Grubb
Shrine hopping
This morning, while we were waiting for the bus that would take us to Shingū, the first of our shrine stops, Marty, a tall, affable American who had just finished the Kumano Kodo with his wife, asked us if we were going to “the falls’. He was referring to the Nachi Falls near the Nachi Grand…
Bound for the buckwheat pillow
We finished the last length of our Kumano Kodo Kii hike on Sunday. Leaving Chikatsuyu, I waved goodbye to the farmer stacking straw along with the applauding puppets on the side of the road across from the bus station. It took two bus rides to get us halfway up the Kii mountain where we got off…
Game changer
We took a train out of Gobo and transferred to a bus in Tanabe where got off for our third day of trekking into the mountains on the Kumano Kodo. After staying at in inn in Hadaka (the only visitors, we had the inn to ourselves which was very pleasant) we were well fortified nutritionally for…
The emperor used to walk this?
Last night, after the slip and slide hike on the Kumano Kodo, we stayed at a guest house in Aridagawa on the side of the mountain where orange groves are cultivated on steep terraces. To cap my day of misadventure, sleep was something I was supposed to achieve on a futon rolled out on a tatami…
Okay, that was brutal
Yesterday we checked our bags at the hotel, loaded our daypacks, and left Osaka to begin our four day hike on the Kumano Kodo Kijii, aka the Emperor’s Trail, aka the Land of Death. Two trains got us to the Shimizu-Ura platform where we began following the printed directions in a booklet Ella had printed out…
Osaka Underground
I’m not saying that Japan is unduly haunted by the history of aerial bombing that took place in World War II, but in taking the Osaka Train Station escalator down from street level to the subway kingdom of avenue wide tunnels jammed with shopping outlets and eateries I can’t help thinking that if I were…
Jet Lag Jackhammer
Post by Grubb Whoa…we left LAX Monday mid-afternoon and, after a twelve-hour flight, landed in Osaka in the early evening on the next day. My body was prepared for an early morning stretch and now it was dazedly doing nighttime maneuvers negotiating a very large airport terminal where a very large crowd was lined up for…
Casa Vicens
After the overwhelming experience of Gaudí’s La Familia Sagrada, we thought we’d come back to earth by visiting Casa Vicens, the house he built in the 1880s. It had a nice mixture of oriental modernist design. I loved the tiled turrets rising above the top floor veranda. It just proved there were places for sublime…
Peaking at La Sagrada Familia
I was ready to visit Gaudí’s famous chapel on our last day in Barcelona. I figured a modern Gothic landmark would be a nice capstone to our trip. But I’ve always been influenced by photos of the exterior and the design seemed too busy in an ornamental way. And when we approached the building, the dull brown terra…