We got up and out of our wonderful, free campsite and headed out to meet our day of temples. Shikoku, as I’m sure we’ve mentioned before, is famous for the 88 Buddhist temple pilgrimage. Any time of year, although more often in the warmer months, you can see pilgrims in white tops and bottoms walking the roads between the 88 temples that line the entire coast and top many of the mountains of the island of Shikoku. Since we had hit one already, we got it in our minds that we should hit as many as we could before leaving Shikoku’s shores. Today, we would try to hit a few while making our way toward the ultimate goal of Muragame Castle – the castle park of a nearby city.
Our first temple shared its name with the neighborhood of our camp site – Kokubunji. As temples often are, it was a serene place with many statues and, usual for Shikoku, many white clad pilgrims. What made this one a bit different was that it had a “mini 88 temple pilgrimage”. Each temple had donated one statue toKokubunji and they had recreated the pilgrimage in miniature – kind of. Really it was just a line of statues with the names of the 88 temples beside them. We quietly walked around the grounds, observed a couple prayers, saw how much money people drop on their white linen pilgrim-wear (a lot), and headed back to route 33 toward Muragame.
We managed to hit two other temples before getting to Muragame. One was more a shrine than a temple and the other had an underground cave full to the brim with tiny, gold kannon statues. A bit kitchy if you ask me. Right before getting to Muragame city, we stopped for some udon.
Udon is the famous thick, white wheat noodle that is most often served in a hot broth topped with grated ginger and chopped scallions, It come in many different incarnations but that is your basic udon. Shikoku, as we quickly found out, is very famous for not only udon, but cheap, fast udon. Almost all the udon places we’ve seen have been “self” which really turns out to be less self-serve and more like cafeteria style. For the second day in a row, we filled our selves with too much udon at lunch time and returned to our bicycles about 2 lbs. heavier and not excited to cycle. Luckily, the udon drunkenness wears off quickly.
At the castle, we walked through the gates into what appeared to be the preparations for a flower festival that would no doubt be happening very soon. Tall chrysanthemums sat alongside carefully manicured bonsai trees while old, tanned men and women scurried about making preparations. We peeked into a couple tents and then headed up the steep incline to the main grounds of Muragame Castle. When we finally made it to the top, we were greeted with a stunning view of the Seto Inland Sea (we could see all the way to Honshu!) and the “remains” of the castle – a tiny tower you could pay to 3 dollars to enter. No thanks. We enjoyed the view but, on a sadder note, realized that our idea to cycle to Kannonji , a city on the opposite coast from our current location, would require almost a day of straight city riding. We regrettably nixed that idea and headed back down to meet our bikes.
On our way back home, we decided that our time without internet had gone long enough. It had been almost five days since we updated the blog and its many parts so we hopped into a little internet cafe for what we thought would be a quick thirty minutes of updating. An hour and fifteen minutes later, we left with most things updated, bellies full of free coffee, corn soup, milk tea and hot chocolate, and a bit of a ride to do before arriving back at our home base.
When we finally got back home, I took another quick and cold hose bath (revitalizing!) and Meghan, having not been comfortable with the idea of a very public and cold hose bath, ran over to the public bath on premises. Since I was energized and clean, I told her to take her time in the bath and I would prepare dinner. When she got back a little over an hour later, we enjoyed a very random meal of red lentils, curry croquet, tiny hot dogs and steamed broccoli. Random, but tasty (and we finally got rid of those red lentils)!
Dishes. Star Trek. Pack up the bags for a very early morning. Bed.
