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 back home. We were headed towards the Jizobu-ji temple at the top of a mountain ridge, the halfway point in the day’s hike.
The booklet said we would gradually ascend. Ah, no. The woods were beautiful, tall aromatic trees with scarlet camellias in bloom and scattered on the mountain path, but the path was steep. And rocky. And knotted with roots. I leaned forward with my pack and I clambered in a doddering way, so I guess you could say I “dambered”. The humidity had me dripping with sweat, and the incline had me stopping every fifty feet to catch my breath. Towards the top my heart was hammering away making me stop every twenty feet.
At crest of the ridge, if we poked our heads through the thickly needled tree branches we could glimpse a view of Kainan, the waterfront town that was our day’s end destination. It looked far away. My sweat turned cold.
When we made it to the temple it was starting to rain. No one was there. Not a living animal in sight. No creatures scuttling in the underbrush, no birds making the appropriate sounds, nothing but the gentle patter of the rain. So far in our hike we hadn’t seen a soul.
But given the temple, maybe souls weren’t meant to be seen. Just the stone Jizu statues that guarded the exterior.
There was a large public restroom to the side of the temple. The toilet flush was the only sound that disturbed the quiet. We swaddled our packs in protective covering and began our descent through the bamboo forest towards the Fujishira shrine. In the rain. Over slippery rocks. I neglected to make an offering at the temple and I paid for it.
The pack threw off my sense of balance. I didn’t want to lean forward going down, so my tendency was to feel the pack pull me backward as I tried to avoid slippery stones. I was doing alright at the beginning in the light rain, but it didn’t let up and my legs started to feel the strain of righting my balance. Ella was the first to slip. She broke her fall with her right hand and for a moment we worried about her wrist, but it just seemed to be bruised. It wasn’t long before the pin needles slid underneath my unsure footing and I toppled down on my butt. And getting up in the rain from the mud with a pack on my back after two hip replacements at the age of seventy-five minus five days is not easy. In fact, without taking my pack off, it wasn’t going to happen. And Ella, who was down-trail from me, wasn’t eager to climb back up and relieve me of my burden.
Multiply that image three or four times and you get the picture of how much fun I had tumbling down the mountain. By the time we made it to the road that led to the Fujishima shrine on my rubbery undependable legs, I was all washed up. Luckily it was easy to find the shrine in the rain since there was sign on the road with Ella’s name on it.
Two nice attendants gave us a tour of the shrine and I bought Ella an amulet. We needed the gods to look kindly upon us. Inside one of the wooden temples we watched a PowerPoint presentation explaining the history of the Japanese Buddhist/Shinto convergence and the sharing of shrines. The temple we were in had a row of ancient sculpted Buddhas, some with very expressive faces, depicting solace in various forms.
Judging from the worn out expression on my face, the tour guide guessed that I was tired enough for him to make sure there were chairs for me to sit in as we went from the temple to the Suzuki home down the road. The sixteenth-century dwelling was what you might imagine from the movies of Shogun era Japan. Tatami mats, square open rooms with sliding wooden doors that opened onto an exquisite Zen garden. I was ready to spend the rest of the day there, but we had to get back to the train station to get our ride up to the guest house where we were spending the night.
The tour guide told us it was a twenty-minute walk to the station, but after checking me out he offered to give us a ride. So buying the amulet was a good thing!