My thoughts on the pilgrimage

This pilgrimage was the most challenging experience I have undertaken in my life. Whilst that probably doesn't say much since I have led a rather sheltered life, it has fundamentally changed my values and way of thinking. I am still thinking about what this pilgrimage has taught me but I still need some time to distance myself from it and from the present aches and pains I feel that colour how I am thinking about it mentally...if that makes sense.

It's been about 5 days since I finished and I guess my body realised it could finally rest. Consequently, I have been absolutely exhausted. I tire by the afternoon and often can't keep my eyes open past 9pm at night. Aches and pains that I thought I had overcome in the first couple of weeks came back with a vengeance.

I started the pilgrimage rather hard-core, walking about 10 hours everyday on very little sleep the night before since I slept outdoors. I didn't eat very well bc I wanted to just keep walking, when I think about it now I realise in the beginning my goal was just to reach as many temples as possible in a day and trying to keep pace with the other pilgrims. Certainly not in a very spiritual place during that time. I was in a lot of pain and often thought of giving up. Each morning I woke up at about 5 or 6am to start walking. A late morning was starting my walk at 7am. Since I slept outdoors I had to clear out fairly early anyway and I felt pretty good walking in the morning. It was after walking about 7 or 8 hours when the pain would set in and taking one painful step after another was a trial. Those were the times I wanted to quit and give up the crazy idea of walking an entire island. The pilgrimage seemed insurmountable and 88 temples was just one too many.

I still enjoyed each day of walking though. There was never a morning when I woke up and was depressed about being on the pilgrimage. I knew that doing the pilgrimage was a choice I made and I was determined to make the most of it. It was only those few hours in the afternoon when I would doubt myself. Looking back now, I realise that I needed to go through all those self-doubts and pain in order to appreciate my peace of mind in the latter half of the pilgrimage. On Day 3 of the pilgrimage whilst climbing for 7 hours up a mountain to Temple 12, I befriended 3 other Japanese guys who were also doing the pilgrimage. They were all about my age and we were all sleeping outdoors. The rest of the ppl I met were old guys and they all had bookings for hotels. So the 4 of us ended up walking an extra couple of hours down the mountain that day after reaching the peak and found a shelter in a parking lot. So I slept on a table and the other 3 guys slept on the ground. I guess being a female foreigner, alone on this pilgrimage and sleeping outdoors was pretty strange to other pilgrims I met. Consequently, those 3 guys felt like they had to take care of me and make sure I was ok. So we all traveled together after that and for the first 2 days life was easier for me; I didn't have to worry about reading the map, speaking Japanese or worrying about where to sleep at night. However not being in control of my time, keeping pace with guys who were much more hard-core than I was ... I slowly realised that taking this easy way out was making me unhappy. I thought long and hard on the 3rd day of traveling with these guys and came to the conclusion that I started this pilgrimage wanting to learn as much about myself as possible. Blindly following and relying on ppl to complete this pilgrimage for me was the wrong way of going about it. At the end of the third day with them, I thanked the guys but told them to go on ahead of me as I wanted to take it slower.

Doing the pilgrimage on my own after that was the best decision I could have made. While I walked, I had time to notice all the small things, take photos of moments that caught my fancy, stop and rest whenever I wanted, do a lot of thinking. I no longer felt so pressured to keep a pace that was not natural to me.

Being a pilgrim, I wore the pilgrim outfit. I walked with a walking stick, I wore the traditional white shirt that the Japanese wear when they die. I also had the big wide pilgrim hat but it was so big it kept hitting my huge backpack so I left it and used my old ladies' sun hat instead. The outfit identified me as someone different and I found the elderly locals approached me all the time; bowing, wishing me luck on completing the pilgrimage, and engaging me in conversation to understand why I was doing the pilgrimage. Usually they would try to help me any way they could. These gifts were called osetai and usually involved food, money, directions on how to get to a temple, shelter, lifts in the car or offers on taking my backpack to the next temple so that I could walk unburdened. It is rude to refuse osetai but I usually refused the car lifts unless it was very necessary. Sometimes the money osetai was a lot and I would refuse it but the locals would push the money at me anyway. I was always very touched whenever I received osetai. The kindness from these strangers were never asked for but always given freely. It made me appreciate just how much good there was in this world and how kind ppl are.

It wasn't until the 2nd week of the pilgrimage that I also came to another crucial lesson. It wasn't how much I suffered on this pilgrimage that would allow me to learn the most. Every night for the first two weeks my feet ached. Sometimes it ached so much it felt like my toes were falling off. On days when I walked over 40km I found that I was in so much pain at night I couldn't sleep and it would take me the next 2 days to recover. This, I realised, was not how I wanted to do the pilgrimage. Pain was not going to bring insights and lessons. I deliberately slowed down. I planned only about 30-35km of walking a day. By the third week I found I got more and more tired, on some days I rested early. I also booked more nights in Japanese inns so that I could have a good night of rest. I accepted car lifts during the day if it meant I could get to a place to sleep at night that was indoors. I also took the train a couple of times to shorten some distances that would require 2-3 days to cover between temples. It was no longer a "pure walk" on this pilgrimage but for me, it no longer mattered if it was a pure walk or not. What mattered was how I conducted myself on this pilgrimage, how I interacted with the locals, what lessons I learnt and my frame of mind.

My next lesson? I had to experience the bad in order to appreciate the good. I had to go through the entire spectrum in order to understand just how blessed I was. Not everyone I met were nice and kind. There were a few times when I found myself in some scary situations but I had faith that I would get through it. This didn't mean that I would be passive and rely on some higher power to see me through. One of those scary moments was staying in a zenkonyado (a free room provided by a local) with other pilgrims that I didn't know. We all got along really well and one of the pilgrims suggested we head out to the next temple together, a walk that was 2 days away. Even though I preferred to walk on my own, I didn't know how to refuse, so I agreed we would head out together the next morning. That night, one of the elderly ppl who ran the zenkonyado came up to me quietly and away from all the other ppl. He told me that the person that I was to travel with the next day was a "waruii no hito, sukoshi abunaii", quite literally, "a bad person, a little dangerous". I was shocked, he seemed fine to me but when I pressed him to explain, I found that my limited Japanese made it difficult to understand his reasoning. I concluded the elderly person was just overly cautious. The next morning however, another elderly man came up to me and expressed the same sentiments. This was then followed by a girl who was staying in the zenkonyado and she confirmed the man was not safe to travel with... I decided to leave straight away. I told the man that I would start on ahead and I would meet up with him at the end of the day since there was only one place to stay for the night between the 2 temples (a roadside hut, out in the open). What I was planning to do was walk as fast as I could for 10km to the expressway and catch a bus that would take me past that roadside hut and to another place to sleep for the night, closer to the next temple. By a sheer stroke of luck, my teacher Ms. Yamazato, quite out of the blue decided to look for me that day. Despite me being in the next prefecture and her not knowing where I was in the pilgrimage and us not being in touch for over a week...she found me. I was taken much further that day then I had planned, as far away as I could physically get from that bad person who was a little dangerous.

So the pilgrimage wasn't a walk in the park. The 2 typhoons added to the excitement, basically the only time I was glad my backpack was heavy bc it kept me anchored during the strong winds. Most of the temples happened to be located on top of mountains so I did a lot of trekking during the month, no matter what the weather. The only time I was scared for my safety was during the 2nd typhoon that hit Shikoku while I was climbing up and down 2 mountains to reach Temple 81 and 82 (there were 3 typhoons in total that hit Japan but one of them veered off and hit the main island instead) . I was completely alone on the mountain trails, it was raining hard, fog obscured the path and the heavy rains kept washing the trails away. It was a little dangerous going downhill and I was soaked right through despite wearing raingear, so I was chilled to the bone.

Despite that, the weather on the whole was pretty good. The hot spell was over on my first day of walking, the remaining days were sunny but not as oppressively hot as when I started. I kept meeting many kind ppl, my wellbeing kept improving as the pilgrimage progressed. I kept marveling at how lucky I was to be able to do the pilgrimage; to have the time, money and health to complete it. The 2nd typhoon hit on my second-last day of the pilgrimage so I had to stop early. It was the perfect way to end the final days of the pilgrimage bc I stopped at an onsen (public bath) that had an outdoor rock pool. It was so quintessentially Japanese; right in the middle of a typhoon, there I was soaking in an outdoor onsen, experiencing the wild wind and rain, while out piped fake nature noises through the speakers. It doesn't get more Japanese than that.

So for me, it was a life-changing experience. Though the days boiled down to walking and thinking, I experienced so much more than that. I stepped out of my comfort zone and accomplished something that in the beginning seemed impossible. I got to know Japan on a very personal level and it was the perfect way for me to say good-bye.

Tuesday Oct 26, 2004. 4.55pm. Dwayne's place, Aichi-ken, Japan