Day 6 -- The cloudy mountains of Tokushima

Total distance: ~26 km (including mountains)

Pictures start here.

Spent some time in a cloud today

Today was a particularly rainy day. In fact, last night I was awoken several times by some loud cracks of thunder as a storm passed right over us. Luckily the storm was gone by the time I set out in the morning, but the rain was not. Luckily, I bought a rain coat from a convenience store yesterday so I was ready to go!

Yesterday I mentioned a place called Green House, and how one of the guys I was with yesterday kept recommending it. I did actually end up taking that recommendation because everywhere near 22 was completely booked solid by 7AM this morning. Luckily, they sent a car to get me and are going to be nice enough to give me a ride back to 22 tomorrow morning so I can say I’ve walked the whole trail. It’d be kinda underhanded to start walking from here, 10 km hence. I said I'm going to walk the whole thing, and I meant it, dammit!

The river between the two mountains

Temple 20 - 鶴林寺 Kakurinji (~6 km of mountains)

Usually the walk from 19->20 is a long one (about 14 km) but I had walked to Kanekoya Ryokan the day before so I had only about 6 more kilos to go. That’s a good thing, because the initial climb was quite steep. I knocked it out pretty quickly though, it being a new day and all.

As I climbed it got foggier and foggier and I soon realized that I was literally ascending into a raincloud. The nice part was that it kinda stopped raining after a certain point.

Also, I don’t know why, but these mountains had so many crabs on them. I couldn’t walk two feet without having to dodge one after the other. It’s like the crabs want to get stepped on or something.

Temple 21 - 太龍寺 Tairyūji (6.5 km of mountains)

I hate these!

I feel like I have to complain briefly about the steps they put in on either side of these mountains. Apparently they’re fairly new and I’m sure they put them there to make the climb safer for people (for example, it’s harder to slip on stairs than it is on loose rocks), but descending from Kakurinji was absolute hell on my knees and ankles.

So after I descended the mountain, I crossed a river and ascended yet another mountain to Tairyūji. Yeah, temples 20 and 21 each had their own mountain. Why not.

Temple 22 - 平等寺 Byōdōji (14 km, mostly flat)

The rest of the walk was pretty easy, though I was already pretty tired from the mountains. I don’t have much to say about the walk, but the temple was pretty.

And that’s the day. There are actually only 23 temples in Tokushima, so tomorrow I’ll be finishing up all the temples in the prefecture and starting the long trek towards Kōchi. It’s kinda scary. The distance between temples 23 and 24 is something like 75 km. I haven’t yet had a day where I wasn’t able to make it to ANY temples, but starting on day 8 I may have two or three in a row, depending on how far I can walk and where all the lodging facilities end up being.