Day 40: 88 Temples (65,68,69) - Kan-Onji

Today we completed the section of the pilgrimage that represents attaining enlightenment and entered the nirvana phase.  I'm all enlightened;  why do I want to go to bed at 7pm?  I think I've entered the "my brain is mush" phase.  I wanna watch TV.

Today we walked from the hotel up the hillside to Temple 65.  It wasn't a long climb but we had a good sweat going on the trail which was the steep part.  

As we neared the top we caught up to another Henro we had not met before.  His name was Joe.  We started chatting and found out he was born in San Francisco and grew up on the Peninsula.  He had spent a lot of time in Japan and his Japanese was good.  When Mike mentioned he had lived in Kobe, Joe said his brother lived in Kobe.  Did his brother hike? Yes, is his name Terry? Yes.  Mike had hiked several times with Joe's brother in the mid-2000s.

Temple 65 was an A-list temple.  It didn't hurt that the leaves were starting to turn adding extra color.

We parted with Joe as he was walking the mountain route to Temple 66.  It is a 20km stretch from 65 to 66.  66 is the highest temple with an 800 meter climb.  There is very little accomodations between 65 and 66 and we were unable to book any.  Not wanting to do a 35km day with a big climb, we opted to walk back to the Kawanoe train station, take the train to Kan-Onji and stay there two nights.  Tomorrow we will take a train, bus and ropeway up to Temple 66 and walk back.

We were close to finished for the day at 11:30.  Our train got to Kan-Onji just after noon.  Our hotel for the first night was across the street from the train station.  We could only get one night and our second night in town is 1km up the road.

We dropped our bags at the hotel a we were way too early for check in.  There are two temple nearby so we could kill some time and check off two temples.

Along the way we looked for lunch and found a noodle place that was doing booming business.  I think they only served one thing.  We got a nice bowl of noodles and a glass of ice water for ¥500.

It was less that 2km from the train to Temple 68 and 69.  On the map it looked like they were across the street from each other but is was more like they were conjoined.  They were two pretty temples across a courtyard.  I was a little surprised in the temple office when the monk stamped two pages and charged two fees.  He was probably the fastest signer I have seen.  He did two pages faster than everyone else did one.

After the temple we ran out of things to do. We stopped by a Lawson for provisions.  With still an hour before 3pm check in we had a beer in the park across from the station.  At 2:45 we thought we would try check in.  We were informed check in was 4pm.  We sat in lobby and by 3:30 we got checked in.   The old sit in the lobby trick works every time.  We had to declare out breakfast type and feo the first time I chose the American breakfast over the Japanese.

Since it's Sunday the restaurant choice is severely limited.  The front desk told us where our choices were.  Bunchan looked like a small, cluttered place when we first walked in but it was bigger on the inside.  There were a lot of tatami table sitting and a counter.  We needed counter on account of not being very bendy.  A friendly guy moved over for us and gave us food advice in Japanese.  When he found out I was from California he joked he was Otani's brother.  We each had 3 skewers of yakitori, sashimi, unagi donburi and a giant beer for about ¥3200 - about $21 - and no tipping.