Post by Ella Time to join the city crowds. See some sights. Yesterday we headed towards the highly touted Dotonbori area. Might have a resemblance to Times Square. Dotonbori Shopping. Long rows of covered arcades filled with vendors. What are you looking for? All flavors of Kit Kats? capsule toys? shoes?UniQlo clothing? Ferris wheels, animatronic…
Category: Silently in Japan
Dōtombori Day
We strolled the Dōtombori neighborhood yesterday. Divided by a canal, It’s a very commercial part of town, and to say that in Osaka means we encountered block after block of outrageous signage. The first stop after surfacing from the metro was to join Japanese families posing in front of the Glico Running Man sign. It’s apparently the…
Deserted, or just quiet?
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…
Bahaha juice
Post by Ella Yesterday we had a few hours to kill in Kii-Katsuura waiting for our train to Osaka. A very small town but an important tuna fishing port. We wandered, were stopped by friendly locals to see if we needed help (we may have looked a bit bedraggled). One pulled up beside us and…
By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
Post by Ella A big day. It’s April 1 here. Grubb’s 75th birthday and our anniversary (16 years married, together 20). Can we give the old arthritic man a congratulations for accomplishing the Kumano Kodo? Hotel Urashima, the most famous resort in western Japan. Situated on the Pacific with the waves crashing practically at the…
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…
In the no hike zone
Post by Ella Grubb grabbed my title “shrine hopping” but that’s what the day entailed. No climbing treacherous mountainsides, no slip sliding, no cursing because the up kept on going. We left that all behind. Today was bus, shrine, train, bus, shrine, temple, sacred waterfall, bus, boat. Topped off by a soak in an Onsen…
Complicated and simple
Post by Ella How to ride a bus in Japan. We’ve successfully decoded the procedure for riding a bus now having taken about a dozen rides. One enters from the rear door and grabs a numbered ticket from a little dispenser. The number on the ticket represents where you got on the bus. If the…
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…
The art of bathing
Post by Ella We are staying at the Fujiya Mae Ryokan, a traditional Japanese hotel in the town of Kawayu Onsen. Grubb is busy working on a post about our final hike yesterday. Onsen indicates hot springs. You can get a scoop at the front desk, walk down to the river, dig yourself a little…
Finally, people!
Post by Ella I’m finding it hard to keep this blog up to date. So many experiences on the Kumano Kodo portion of our trip. The first two days of our walking, we met no one else on the trail. Yesterday our hike took us onto a more popular portion of the Kumano Kodo and…
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…
Shinto pilgrimage
Post by Ella I’ve not said much about the pilgrimage aspect of the Kumano Kodo. The trails we are walking are part of the Kumano Kodo and were developed as a way to get to the most revered shrines. The rugged mountains of the Kii peninsula are a spiritual haven where deities reside. By the way,…
The thigh burning continues
Post by Ella Yuasa to Hidaka Hike #2 went considerably better than Hike #1. No rain for starters. The ascent was paved (gravel in concrete) and not slippery even though we’d had a drenching storm the night before. Howling wind, rumbling thunder, flashing lightning. So all was wet but no mossy rocks to slide on….
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…