October 20, 2006

To sound like a broken record…. another long day on the road from Temple 26 to 27.  I have been traveling on and off with two other Henro’s, Hiro & Kamemoto, we are about at the same speed give or take.  Hiro-san speaks very good English while kamemoto-san knows a little bit but he mostly speaks Japanese to me and I speak English back to him and we actually understand each other pretty well, of course our conversations are mostly about body pain and how far it is the next temple, which is a universal language. 

Hiro & Kamemoto out in front

I’ll try to get a better picture of the lads from the front in the next day or two.  Hiro is from Kyoto and Kamemoto is from Fukuoka, which is on Kyushu Island.

This is the suffer-fest part of the walk as the last 4 hours of each day is nothing but aching feet, backs & other bodily appendages.  Today we did about 18 miles where the last 3 miles was 1.5 miles up to Temple 27 (1300 elev) and 1.5 miles back down again to sea level. 

I have been staying about every 3rd day in a Minshiku (kind of Inn) such as I am tonight,  I really needed a good shower and soft futon to sleep on.  For about $60 you get a room with dinner and breakfast. It’s all good.

HENRO TYPES

So I would say there are several general categories of Henro’s out on the trail.  The first group are people who drive their personnel cars around to each temple. Next group is the little old ladies, usually a group of 3 or 4, that take a taxi around to each temple.  Next comes the tour bus groups and they obviously the biggest organized groups you see at the temples.  After those comes the walkers, where there are two classes.  The first group is the ones who travel light with just a small pack with two or three changes of clothes and they stay at Inns every night and may or may not do a lot of mileage each day as opposed to the group I fall into, which is the hard core walkers who free camp at least 50% or more and are carrying all their gear on their backs and tend to put in mostly long hard days. There are also a few odd categories such as people who ride their bikes and a group I ran into today who are walking the whole way with a professional guide and have a support vehicle lugging their gear for them, which provides drinks and food along the road as they are walking.  I talked to one of the ladies in this group today and she said that their guide was a somewhat famous Henro that had been featured on the National Television station NHK.

Here are a few images from the past couple of days;

Pacific Ocean Below Temple 23

My camping spot for the night

Looking up the coast towards near Muroto

Sunset over the Pacific

Till next time,

Lou