Up bright and early and I’m waiting at a rainy bus stop in Hongu for the 5:44 bus to Miyanoue so I can head up the road to Nakahechiko Chikatsuyu and start my walk.
Chikatsuyu is a rice farming town, but the gradual rise in pilgrimage as word spreads about Kumano Kodo is breathing enterprise into the people there. It’s barely quarter to seven when I find the path, but a woman in a little wooden hut has been waiting for the likes of me, and she easily sells me a coffee at pilgrim prices.
Around me as I drink my coffee, people with backpacks start to emerge from the little minshukus that have started to pop up along the route. They book out months in advance. Soon the availability of rooms will be greater on this route, and I only hope that it doesn’t start to look like a bin. People like my coffee angel have rightly realised that there’s gold in tham thar pilgrims. But with increased footfall comes increased risk of the sort of louts who have literally turned sections of the Camino into litter-alleys.
I’m one of the first on the path, which is how I like it, although it raises the odds of wildlife. You know when you’re the first as you are breaking cobwebs with your face. When that happens, slow down and switch on. Nobody is in front of you to step on the snakes and scare the bears. That’s your job, cobweb breaker.
It’s a stunning and varied walk to Hongu on this – the Nakahechi Route Stage 2. But it’s a long long way if you take it all in and go up to all the oji – (little travel shrines. There are loads.)
I’m picking my way up to one oji, cobweb breaking, when I hear Mary and Andy down below. Good people. Andy quit marijuana the year before I was born. They have started early too.
I catch up with them and it breaks into a pleasant and conversational start to the day. We flank the fields and paddies as the town slowly tails off and the woods begin. An old man has carved a humorous fountain to flog cold coffee.
Eventually the woods begin again. Much of the rest of the day is going to be about trees. And water. The rain starts up in earnest.
The wildlife count goes right up over the course of this day. Some incredible vast trees, of course.
A deer, trying to determine if we were a threat. At one point a crab crosses the path. And the rain brings out some unexpected travelling companions.
I felt something pulling, and looked down. It took me a moment for my brain to compute it, and now I can tell you how to remove a leech. These are precisely the steps you take.
1: Insult it. My first word, upon computing what it was and what it was doing, was “Fucker”. It remained unmoved, so I repeated it twice, each time more targeted and with more vehemence. Perhaps this weakened its resolve
2: Gingerly poke it. Maybe it is touch averse. If so it will apologise and leave you in peace.
3: Take off your pack and sit on it. Your pack, not the leech.
4: Photograph it. Some leeches are camera shy.
5: Consider your options. “I have no salt. I don’t want to kill it when it is attached. If I pull it off I might have infected bits of leech in me. I could wait for it to finish and then it’ll just fall off… but I really don’t want it on me.”
6: Finally remember there’s a damp box of matches in your pocket. (The previous stages are, of course, all crucial to the efficacy of this method.)
7: Fail to light three damp matches. Start to worry you might run out of matches.
8: Successfully light a match. Burn it until it is red then touch the red bit to the leech.
The first time I did it, I was surprised at how quickly the heat makes the leech pull out and move. I waited for it to move both ends once before I flicked it off. Strange creature. With the rain, by the end of the day I’d met plenty of them.
Wet, varied and beautiful, with the Kumano river crossing back and forth, the path wound out, mile by mile. Some shrines with great strength. I clap at a few of them.
Parts of today’s route were inhabited until 1956, but now once you’re in the woods you are very much on your own with a long long way to a nice woman selling coffee in a china cup.
Eventually, at the top of a hill, I caught a glimpse of the town where I woke up, and the massive torii-gate I walked out of at dusk last night.
What’s the point of taking a bus in the morning just so you can walk over twenty miles back to where you started? Who knows but it has been marvelous and I just had time at the end of the day to register myself at the tourist office as a “dual pilgrim”. I’ll even get a certificate.
Dinner at the ramen joint in Hongu as the bus to Yunomine Onsen wasn’t until just before 7pm. Bus to J-Hoppers, and it’s got brilliant hot springs where you can lock the door, shower, and sit in a pool of hot water coming out of the rock in front of you. I never wanted to leave. It’s still golden week. Lots of people taking the week off.
I was incomprehensibly tired by the time I went to bed. But they’ve already put a piccy up of me with my CERTIFICATE.
AlBarclay 