March 9

We felt so blessed when we woke up this morning and were warm! It was so quiet and peaceful here surrounded by the temple buildings and the trees. Soon we will be in the city of Kochi and experiencing city life. It will be quite the contrast. Now though we have to figure out if the plan that we came up with last night will work. We are heading to a guest house called Suisan. There isn’t a room available tonight, but we were told that she has a yard where we can pitch our tent. Again Miss Misno came to our rescue by organizing this lodging. We want to visit three temples today, so our plan is to stop at Suisan guest House and see if we can leave our packs there, while we walk to temples 29, 30,31. After temple 31 we will catch a bus and then a train, back to the station that is with in walking distance of the guest house. Our logistics need to go smooth. Really that is the only option. We don’t have an alternative plan.

We arrive to the guest house and using our translator app, explain that we want to leave our backpacks here and then we will see her later tonight to set up our tent in the yard. She shows us where to put our packs and we are off heading to Temple 29.

We walk past more agriculture areas marveling at the well kept fields.

From backyard gardens to large fields the earth is preparing for the season of growing.

We keep on the lookout for signs telling us which way to go. Sometimes it seems like we are walking in someone’s backyard. The route tries to follow the original pilgrim trail and sometimes it does go thru someone’s backyard.

We are figuring out the characters for temple and the characters for the Ohenro Pilgrimage trail A beautiful rest area is on the way to the next temple. There is a sign there for no sleeping, but welcomes one to take a break. As we are taking a break a Japanese pilgrim shows up and wants to take a picture with us and his stuffed animal with a sedge hat. Even though we can't speak each others language , a smile goes a long way.

Soon we approach Kokubunji (29)

This is the main temple of the Kochi Prefecture

A beautiful walk way lined by cedar trees is part of the temple grounds.

There are more people at the temples today. We are getting close to Kochi which is a large city.

All the bell towers are different as well as the sounds they make. Several Japanese people have told us to ring the bell loudly, but just once.

Heading out the temple and going to the next one.

We were glad to see this sign, so far we have stayed on route today.

Once again we walk on paths going thru the fields.

Temple 30 has some beautiful statues.

In front of the hall we see Amy. We thank her for being our interpreter last night and tell her what we experienced sleeping at the room on the temple grounds. As we are sitting talking to her we are approached by an older couple. They hand us an red osame-fuda (name slip) The red color signifies that they have done this pilgrimage 9 times, Our name slips are white.

We take pictures together. She then hands each of us a bag of candy as osettai. We give her a a sticker from Alaska.

We check our map and feel pretty good about going to the next temple. Amy is staying near here so once again we say good by and are not sure if our paths will cross again. The next temple is about 5 miles away. At least that is what we think. We have misjudged the distance before and unfortunately it always seems to be longer than we think. This time it was due to making a wrong turn. There was a long tunnel ahead and we thought that we needed to go thru it. When we reached the other side we realized our mistake. We had to go back thru the tunnel and take another road. This was probably the longest tunnel that we walked thru and then we had to do it twice. We hope not to make that mistake again. The other challenge we had getting to the last temple was that it was located on top of the mountain. We just kept going up and more up. Not sure how we missed that information about the approach to the temple was steep. We passed a view point and got a great view of Kochi. If all goes as planned that will be our destination for tomorrow. Today is today and we still have some major logistics to figure out. The main one being returning to the guest house where our backpacks are located. Just as we arrived to the top of the mountain and before entering the Temple grounds we saw a bus stopping at a sign. We walked over and checked the schedule using our app. From what we could figure there would be a bus here in a hour to take us to the JR Train station in Kochi. From there we could catch a train to the station near the guest house. Our logistics might just work our. With only an hour to check out temple 31, we walk briskly to it.

Kochi is the only large city on the south coast of Shikoku. The population is around 328,000. We will look forward to visiting it tomorrow. Now though we have our last temple to explore and the grounds are huge.

We entered at the back of the temple so we worked our way thru the grounds to find the front gate.

This is a beautiful temple and location. We can see why it is so popular.

The deities protecting the temple look ancient.

Colorful banners are hung in front of the Hondo

We are enjoying looking at all of the statues.

Even cats are included in some of the statues.

I will be checking the stomach of cats more closely!

Another statue was half enclosed in glass.

The flower arrangement in front of the statue added to the peacefulness.

This pagoda was built in 1980. It is the only 5 story pagoda in the Kochi prefecture.

An hour was barely enough time to explore this temple, but we knew we had to make the bus arriving soon. About 5 minutes after arriving to the bus stop, the bus pulled up and we were on our way to the train station. There were several more stops along the way which completely filled all of the seats. Soon we were unloading from the bus and heading to the train station. We needed to find where to buy a ticket for the Noichi station. It seemed the signs were lacking in English so we asked the man in the ticket booth to help us. He came out and showed us which buttons to push. He told us that we would need to change trains, and that we should play attention. He pointed us to the right platform and quickly after we boarded the train started moving. We pulled out our Google Map app and it showed us moving on the train. We watched for where we needed to depart from the train and get on the next one. It was a smooth transition and soon we were chugging along to the Noichi station. We were the only ones getting off here and the station was empty except for a food vendor that was selling baked goods and fruit. We will need to buy tickets here in the morning and there is a good possibility that no one will be around. As we were looking at the ticket machine, we noticed that there was no English button to help with the purchase.. The woman from the little food store came over to see if she could help us. When she figured out our dilemma , she showed us how to purchase the tickets in the morning. We bought some food from their table for dinner and headed to our guest house about a half mile away. It was getting dark when we arrived. The host apologized for not having any rooms and said she would take us to an onsen. We assured her that we were fine and taking a bath at her house would be adequate. It has been a long day and the tired factor is creeping in. She showed us where to put up our tent. Just as we were finishing putting it up, she arrives with numerous blankets and pillow. She wanted to make sure we would stay warm. We told her that our sleeping bags would keep us warm, but she insisted that we keep some of them. She also told us that tomorrow she would make breakfast for us and take us to the train station. Sleep came quickly!

Accommodation sleeping in our tent outsider Suisan Guest House

Miles hiked 18