Greetings from chilly Matsuyama, Japan! We’ve got a lot to catch up on.

The rest of my stay in Canberra was great. I got to spend lots of time with Colin and family, including some hiking, tennis, and general strolling around town. After that it was time to get to Sydney, and I made a point to arrive in time for Sunday dinner and Mike’s world famous smoked pulled pork. For as incredibly delicious as dinner was the real highlight was being reunited with everyone in good old St Ives. It’s been really fun getting to know them and they’ve taken such good care of me during my time in Australia. I think it’s pretty exceptional to be gifted a whole extra family in your thirties, and I don’t take it for granted.

That was pretty much the theme of my time in Sydney—enjoying the friends I made during my first stint there. As has probably been pretty obvious if you’ve followed the blog, my year in Australia was lonely at times. When I take a step back though, I feel very lucky about the people I met and the friendships I made during that year. It was bittersweet saying “hello again” and “goodbye for now” so quickly with these friends in Sydney, but the good news is that most people who live in Australia travel regularly, and one of the places they travel most frequently is Bali, where I’m planning to stay for a while. So I expect to see most of these friends again pretty soon.

Besides catching up with people my time in Sydney was pretty much spent trying to sell my van and eating at all my favorite places again. The less said about the van sale the better—it caused me a ton of stress and cost me a fair bit of money, but I got it sold the day before I left. Otherwise, yeah, strolling and eating and chatting and getting ready for the next move.

And then, before I knew it, Japan! I’d been to Japan once before, for a week in the middle of my 6 month trip right after graduating from college. I loved it and had always wanted to come back, so this was the perfect opportunity. The flight over was great—I was a bit worried about the low cost airline I was booked with, but they gave me no trouble about my heavy luggage, the flights were on time and pleasant enough, and I somehow got upgraded to an exit row for both legs of the trip. I was thrilled the first time, and when it happened again, apparently because the seat I’d picked was “unusable”, I really started to wonder if Australia had wanted me to leave all along, and now this was my reward.

After the surprisingly comfortable trip it was, of course, time for a surprisingly uncomfortable hotel stay. If you chatted with me at all during my last month in Australia you know that I was pretty much underwater stressing about selling my van, so I did basically no research and preparation for Japan. The one thing I managed was to book a cheap hotel for my first two nights so that I’d have somewhere to go. I booked it a couple of weeks out and it had free cancellation until just a day or two before, so I told myself I’d check it a bit more thoroughly sometime during that window and adjust if need be. As you can imagine that never happened, so it was only while sitting in the airport, the free cancellation window firmly closed, that I discovered that in Japan pretty much all heating is provided by AC units in the rooms. When I was booking I’d seen options for rooms with or without AC. Savvy, frugal traveler that I am, I said “who the hell needs AC in February in Japan” and booked the really-only-marginally cheaper, non-AC room. So, yes, I spent my first two nights in Japan, where the temperature was already a shock after a year in Australia, in an unheated room. This was not ideal, and some combination of the preceding weeks of stress, the travel, and the cold saw me come down with what has turned into a pretty solid cold. Bummer!

I was still feeling mostly fine for my first couple of days in Osaka and spent them pretty much just wandering around all day, dipping into cafes and restaurants, looking for tiny alleys to stroll down, and soaking it all in. Even tired and freezing, I was really excited to be here. I don’t want to slander good old Australia, but one of the things I struggled with there was that, when I wasn’t out in some incredibly beautiful part of nature, it felt just like the US. And that doesn’t really light me up, travel-wise. Japan, on the other hand, really scratches that travel itch. I have to admit I was initially a little taken aback, having forgotten what it’s like to travel somewhere you really, truly, cannot even begin to speak or understand or read or anything. But pretty much everyone I’ve come across has been very friendly and accommodating, and I’m easy to please, so I’m getting along very well.

After the unheated nights I upgraded to a place around the corner that was basically the good version of the previous one. Still just a tiny room with a tatami and a futon on the floor, with shared bathrooms and only a couple of shared showers on the first floor. But in this place there was heat, sweet sweet heat, and everything else was just a bit cleaner and nicer and better. So I spent a very comfortable couple of days there and then it was time for my first Japan reunion, with my friend Rob. I hadn’t seen Rob in a couple of years, since I was living in San Diego, and it was awesome to get together again. To his enormous credit, given that he’s busy with work and I’m… not, he organized absolutely everything for us to spend a couple of days hiking the beautiful Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail a few hours south of Osaka.

The Kumano Kodo is a pilgrimage trail that’s apparently been in use for over a thousand years, at least in parts. It passes a huge number of shrines, winding up and down through beautiful forest and across the mountains. In recent times it’s become more of an attraction for foreign tourists than an active pilgrimage trail, just like its sister pilgrimage (I didn’t really understand the arrangement here but there was a display about it), the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

From Osaka we took the train a couple of hours south to Tanabe, where we spent the night in a more western-style hotel. Many hotels and guesthouses here provide yukatas, a type of light kimono often worn indoors and/or as a bathrobe. Normal ones are probably what you’d imagine—nice patterns, you wrap them around yourself and hold them closed with a sash. The one in Tanabe seemed to be some kind of cultural fusion situation, as it was all white and buttoned all the way down the front. This was… a shockingly bad choice. In combination with the unusual black leather slippers (slippers are also typically provided since you take your shoes off pretty much everywhere indoors, but they’re typically patterned, again as you’d expect) that looked like ladies’ pumps it made for quite an exceptional look.

The next day we hopped on a bus to Takijiri-oji, one of the major shrines along the route and our starting point. We poked around the info center and gift shop for a little and then hit the trail, which was everything I’d hoped for. Soaring cedar trees, mossy rocks, streams, walls made of perfectly interlocking stones. The whole thing was picturesque. We eased into it with our first day— about 8 miles, but a decent amount of elevation gain. Our destination was a town called Chikatsuyu, and we arrived a little after 3pm. This gave us lots of time to settle in to our beautiful guesthouse, go for a quick stroll around town, and then get into our much nicer yukatas for dinner and a relaxing evening.

The next day was the big kahuna—17 miles to Hongu Taisha, the main shrine of this whole section of pilgrimage, which also boasts the largest torii gate in Japan, 34 meters tall and 42 meters wide. After a couple of hours walking on the road through adorable little mountain villages the second half of this route was even more beautiful than the day before. We took our time, stopping at all the shrines and chowing down at various points, and ended up spending just over 9 hours on the trail. It was a delightful hike but obviously not ideal for my cold, and I was pretty beat by the end. That said, the shrine was beautiful. They asked not to post pictures online out of respect, so you’ll have to use your imagination (or google), but it’s pretty much exactly how you would imagine a Japanese shrine/temple complex nestled in the woods. The giant torii is also impressive and didn’t carry the same prohibition, so you can enjoy my crappy picture of it.

And that was it for hiking. The next morning we just enjoyed a bit of slow time in Hongu with a couple of coffees and a nice stroll around town, admiring the mountains all around. Then it was an hour and a half on the bus back to Tanabe, then three and a half hours on the train to Osaka. We checked into our hotel and then met up with Ryo, Rob’s good friend who lives a little ways outside of Osaka. Ryo is very nice and has been giving me lots of advice about what to do around Kyoto, and it was great to put a face to the name (put a face to the texts…?). They went out for dinner while I nursed my cold with takeout in the hotel room and an early bedtime. The next morning we met up with Ryo again for coffee and I was glad to have a chance to actually chat with him a bit.

And then, before we knew it, it was time to part ways. Ryo headed home, Rob headed off to Tokyo, and I caught a bus to Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku. A couple of people recommended Shikoku as a close, easily accessed area that doesn’t see as much foreign tourism and might be a bit more off the beaten track, which is exactly what I’m looking for on this trip. So far that seems pretty accurate—I’ve seen one other white person in my day and a half here, and have already had several locals be very surprised and excited to see me. Takamatsu is certainly a legitimate city, but nothing like the scale of Osaka or Tokyo, and I’m enjoying lots of udon, which the area is known for. My cold is holding steady these days so I’m mostly laying low and resting, but the one major attraction I did visit was Ritsurin Garden. This was another thing that made a strong impression during my first brief visit to Japan—I absolutely love Japanese gardens. Ritsurin is a huge one with several different ponds and viewpoints, and I spent a couple of hours wandering around and enjoying it.

Otherwise Takamatsu was a good, relaxing stopover, and yesterday I caught the bus to Matsuyama, the other big city on Shikoku. I’m spending three nights here in another Japanese style guesthouse, this time one that’s also a small craft brewery. I’m bummed that my cold will limit my ability to try all of their offerings but I think I’ll still manage to sample one or two.