Reflections on the Shikoku Pilgrimage

It is over a week now since we decided to stop cycling the '88' pilgrimage and I've had time to reflect a little. I've been thinking about the reasons we found it so difficult, the problems we had, and whether they were avoidable. I thought I would post them here for any of you people who are thinking of undertaking the pilgrimage yourselves.  It's always good to learn from someone else mistakes rather than one's own! So here we go, hope it helps. I've listed them in the order of importance that it feels to me, of course everyone handles things differently.

Henro Shop, Temple One

Starting out all fresh at Temple One

Temperature

So, we are English. This means we are used to a moderate climate, rarely above 25 or below freezing. It's often raining and if it's not raining it's damp. Sunny days are spent outside as much as possible as you never know when the next one is coming along. A good day is a day when it doesn't rain. This doesn't prepare you for cycling in hot climates. This summer was a warm one in Britain as I discovered walking the coast path; it gave me a taste of hiking in 30 degrees and I didn't like it one little bit. So I am not used to cycling or walking in hot weather and Mick does the heat even less well than I do. He complains when the temperature is over 20 degrees! Japan has had a severe heatwave this year, with the thermometer hitting over 40 in the summer. Even in late September it was into the thirties when we arrived. Most days after ten am we struggled with the heat and the humidity and the mosquitoes were going at us with a vengeance. It sapped our energy and our enthusiasm. We couldn't have known in February that it was going to be so warm at this time of year. Talking to other O-henro (pilgrims) late September and October are normally a good time to be doing the pilgrimage. I guess we were just unlucky.

Cooling off

The Gradients

Temple 12 is the first mountain temple and first nansho (difficult place). Although we didn't say anything to eachother at the time, it was the experience of cycling up to Temple 12 that caused us both  concerns about how this journey was going to turn out. It was steep, much steeper than I had imagined, the road switchbacking up through the forest. We struggled up with our loaded bikes in the crushing heat, stopping whenever we could find a little bit of shade. I longed with every twist in the road that it would be the last, but the road went interminably on and on. Getting up that mountain took us hours. By the time we finally reached the top we were utterly exhausted. My only hope was that the others would not be so steep. I was soon disabused of this notion however.

Tairuji, Temple 21 was especially galling as we navigated badly and ended up being on the wrong road for the cable car or ropeway which would have carried us up the mountain (albeit for quite an expensive price) whereas now we had to push up it. The road is clearly not well used now and the condition of it was poor. On and on that road went, in places the only way I could even manage to  push up was by weaving from one side of the road to the other. In hindsight it would have been far better to leave the bikes and hike up, which we did a couple of times, but this wasn't always possible if we were heading on to the next temple.

Mountain Road

The Gear

We are camping and so some gear is impossible to manage without. The tent for example. Although we tried to keep it to a minimum, by the time we added sleeping bags, mats, tiny stove, camping gas etc we were still carrying around 12 (me) to 15k (Mick - he had the tent) of luggage each on our bikes. I read somewhere that you should carry no more than 5 kilos and this sounds like sensible advice to me.


Lack of Time

The pilgrimage is around 1200 kilometres and as we had arranged to be in Japan for almost seven weeks we thought this would be ample time to cycle around Shikoku. And so it would have been, even with the delay in Osaka due to illness and typhoons, if that was what we had been doing. We were not cycling around Shikoku. We were zigzagging this way and that from temple to temple. We spent the first four days basically going in a big circle around Tokushima before landing back in the centre right where we had started. This felt a little demoralising. We had not factored in the time it took to find the temples, the time we spent checking the map and getting lost, the time it took to push the bikes up the hills to the temples and, perhaps most importantly, the time spent at the temples. After all, the last thing I wanted to do having made all that effort to get there was spend ten minutes and dash off. I wanted to look at them properly and have some time to sit and contemplate and just observe. As we realised that we would struggle to complete the pilgrimage in the time we had available we began rushing. We missed places we should have stopped or detoured to look at. The temples became numbers to be crossed off rather than places to appreciate. We were getting up at five and cycling in the heat of the day in order to get some miles in and then we were too exhausted to eat properly. I lost nine pounds in weight in three weeks (ok that's a plus but you get the picture). It began to feel all wrong, and not in the spirit of pilgrimage at all.


Lack of Belief

Alfred Bohner was a teacher at Matsuyama High School who completed the pilgrimage in 1927. He said that 'if the pilgrimage is undertaken only for pleasure and without a loftier purpose, the pilgrim will soon lose the desire to continue.' Alfred was right, I think. Did we have a loftier purpose? Probably not.   Neither of us are at all religious, and although I am interested in some of the ideas of Buddhism, I don't practice it. We both liked the temples very much aesthetically; they were beautiful and atmospherical places, often providing havens of tranquility in the midst of noisy and hectic surroundings. And listening to Hannya Shingyo, the heart sutra being chanted in Japanese was amazing, I loved the rhythm and the rhyme of the sutra, paced with a chime, which groups of pilgrims would chant. Mick liked to ring the large bell and listen to the beautiful sound of the note as it faded out. But after almost 30 temples the interest had faded. We were templed out. Neither of us had much interest in visiting the remaining fifty-odd temples unless there was something particular to see. And as we got farther south there were long gaps between temples along fast, busy roads, I found myself wishing I could go and look at something else. Mick began to resent the 'pay and pray' aspect as he dubbed it - the offertory boxes in front of every statue and temple and the commercial aspect of it all. He says the moment he had enough was when he was struggling up another interminably steep hill only to be waved at by a monk who passed him in a sleek, air-conditioned vehicle which cruised effortlessly past us. 'I began to wonder why the fuck I was doing this,' he said. I agreed to some extent - lack of understanding of the background to the rituals and the pilgrimage I think, hindered our enjoyment of it.




So, I think that more or less sums it up. Would I recommend the Shikoku 88? Despite all our struggles yes I would, but I would (will?) do it differently next time. If I were planning the Shikoku Pilgrimage again I would, I think, do this:

1. I would come in the spring, April and May, for the sakura, the cherry blossom, Japan's most beautiful time and the best climate. September was still too hot and too many mosquitoes for my taste and there was the problem of the typhoons. October is better, but of course four weeks is not long enough and into November it can start to get too cold and too late in the season.

2. I would walk not bike it. On a bicycle there is little opportunity to meet other pilgrims and if anything  the mountain temples are more difficult than walking. Plus on a bicycle there is no chance to experience  the off road trails which give some relief from the road sections of the pilgrimage. If walking I might even consider riding a bus on the long road stretches, I see little point in trudging down a busy highway for three days. But as someone pointed out to me, maybe those long stretches are as important as the more scenic parts, for challenging one. So I'm not sure. It would be great if more of the route could be made off-road though.

3. I would learn more Japanese. Very few people on Shikoku speak any Japanese at all and although we could get by with hand gestures/drawings/phrasebook etc. I think I would have got more from the journey if I could have interacted with Japanese people a bit more than simply 'hello', 'thank you' and 'can we please camp here?'. Everyone was so interested and so helpful and I felt sorry I could say so little in response.

4. I would take minimum luggage. Maybe a tiny, freestanding tent for camping. But there is plenty of other accommodation available as far as I can tell so a tent isn't really necessary. Few clothes, it is easy to wash and dry them anyway, and not much else. I thought I had got my luggage down to the minimum but I was still overweighted.

5. I would allow lots of time. And I mean lots, months if possible. Or do it over more than one visit, there is nothing to say it has to be completed in one go, everyone had their own way of completing the pilgrimage. If the weather is warm, and as some of the climbs are steep, unless you are super, super  fit (and I am not) rest days and sightseeing days are essential.

Do I regret stopping? No I don't. I'm glad I tried it and had some wonderful experiences. But it was not for us - not now anyway, not this time. We're still here, touring Japan as a regular tourist and having a wonderful time. It's a marvellous place and I hope I haven't put you off the Shikoku 88 Pilgrimage. But it is not a journey to be undertaken lightly or without adequate planning.

Finally, and this deserves a separate post and I will write one as soon as I am able: I have not mentioned the best thing about Shikoku and the best thing about Japan - the people. From the minute we arrived we have experienced nothing but kindness and generosity from local people and when we came to Shikoku and became O-henro then the welcome, the friendship and the help we were given was almost unbelievable. Despite all the tears and the struggles, I am glad I was a henro for a short while for that reason alone. It was truly humbling.

Waymarker

Some of the rest huts are awesome

Another way marker