Temple 87-88: The long and difficult trail to "Nirvana".

After a warm and comfortable night, spent sleeping on traditional mattresses on the tatami mat covered floor of our room in Ryokan Fujiya, we were summoned downstairs to a traditionally cooked, delicious breakfast. 

Our host family have managed this Ryokan for 80 years! We bade them farewell with gratitude for our shelter for the night and continued on our journey.

Temple 87: Nagaoji: This is a neighborhood temple. We vaguely knew that it would be a long walk to Temple 88 from here but in retrospect were completely ignorant of what lay ahead. As we meandered through the neighborhoods enroute to the mountains we met an elderly gentleman standing outside his home. He was extremely soft spoken and was trying to tell us something in Japanese. Through our translation app we picked up the sentences " please proceed with caution and be careful". We thanked him and continued on.

The first half of the walk was blissful, following a path that wound around a dam and through forests with babbling streams. We stopped to take a rest beside a ramshackle shed that looked abandoned and saw through a broken pane of glass a statue of a woman that looked in fairly good shape compared to everything else in there that was ancient and broken. It was odd and very out of place.

Twice we almost stepped on a snake, which after some research seemed to match the description of a harmless jungle rat snake.

 As we climbed further up the mountain the trail became steeper and more difficult with numerous false summits. After many hours we came to the most difficult section of all,  where we basically had to do rock climbing over a knife's edge with our heavy backpacks for a long distance which seemed at some moments threatening to topple me over the edge. Josh is far more nimble than I am and he talked me through the scary sections, with me muttering intermittently " I'm really not having fun right now". There are many sections on the Shikoku hike that are referred to as Henro Korogashi " Henro fall down", meaning where pilgrims often fall. This term is used to describe particularly difficult sections and to me this was the most treacherous part of the journey.

A network of nature trails called Shikoku no Michi that spans 1545km which are categorized as historical trails form much of the Shikoku Henro. 

The hike today took many hours longer than what we expected and we arrived at Temple 88 physically and emotionally drained, in a slight state of dehydration. We now understood what the elderly gentleman along the way was trying to tell us. After getting out stamps at the Noukyocho office and finally figuring out how to obtain a completion certificate,the temple very quickly shut down for the day shortly thereafter. We were stranded on the mountain top and had missed the last bus down to town.

Thank heavens for o-henro-san Tonies, a pilgrim we had met on and off throughout our journey. He offered to call us a taxi which was a huge help and we bade him farewell. Arigato Tonies!

Strangely, finally finishing the 88 Temples pilgrimage on foot divided into 2 sections  (Temple 1-40 in 2020 and Temple 41 -88 in 2025) covering about 1100km in total felt anti-climactic for both of us. There was a lesson in humility to be learned here. We both expected " something" at the end and there was nothing. It was a lesson of how your own expectations when not realized can lead to a feeling of disappointment and that is something you create in your own mind, it is not something done to you. We laughed when we realized this, we had built up an imaginary triumph or acknowledgement at completing this arduous journey but that was not reality. 

Apparently nirvana in life is obtained by releasing desire because desire leads to disappointment and pain. Inadvertently we learned this and had to let go of the desire to feel some type of " groovy feeling" or acknowledgement of obtaining our final stamp. I guess hereby we did arrive at Nirvana upon this realization for a brief moment!