Day 41: 88 Temples (66,67,70) - Kan-Onji

Last night and tonight we are in Kan-Onji, unfortunately, in two hotels.  Tomorrow we have two nights in Marugame.  The two night strategy really helps.  You get to walk one day packless and sleep in the same bed.  It's the small things after 41 days on the road.

This morning was grey but the weather report said clearing in the afternoon.  We left the Sunny Inn and walked over to the Chez Toi, dropped our bags and walked back to the Kan-Onji  train station.  We took the 8:11 train one stop, walked to the street and our 8:20 bus appeared.  There were 4 Henro on the bus, a driver and zero other passengers.  I've seen a lot of that in Shikoku.

The driver let us out for the 4km walk to the ropeway.  The other Henro are a couple from Taiwan.  We have seen each other before but this was the most we talked.  I think they are primarily transit Henro as they don't have the "walking all the way" look.  They also got a little lost and we told the to just follow us.

On the way to the ropeway we got some light rain.  The farm road wound around and up.  Coming down the road, just coming off the ropeway, was Joe.  He had walked up the mountain and took the ropeway down to give his knees a break.  

The cable car wasn't very crowded; four foreign Henro and some ladies going to visit the temple.  The ladies were having a good time.

Temple 66 has something unique.  It has 500 statues of Buddhist saints.  We wandered around looking at them for 30 minutes.  

The temple was fine, beautiful setting and some stunning views even on a grey day.  It also had hundreds of stone lanterns.

As we were getting ready to leave, Alistair, Kevin and Guillaume, arrived after walking up the hill from Temple 65.  A few minutes later Claude got in. They had spent the night at a Henro House room about  15km away near Temple 65.  They all looked gassed but happy to have made the climb.

We headed down the mountain along a wooded path.  It was very steep at times.  It was about 6km to the road where it started to level out.  

After walking past farms we soon arrived at Temple 67.  There were trees that supposedly Kobo himself planted 1200 years ago.

As we were about to leave Kevin and Guillaume walked in.  They reported Alistair and Claude took the ropeway down and would take the flatter route to Temple 67.

We realized we still had 8km to Temple 70 and closing time was becoming a concern.  We had about 2 hours so a long as they didn't close early it would not be a problem.  Still, we walked briskly.  As we walked this section the grey skies went away and it was all blue skies by the time we reached the temple.  Just before the temple a woman unloading her car stopped us and gave us more tangerines than we could carry.  She kept trying to give us more.  They were small but they were good.

At Temple 70 we saw Leo from Taiwan and the Japanese guy from the snowy Henro hut.  They have been walking together for a while now.

Temple 70 was nice but we were tired and this was going to be our latest finish since day 3.  The last light was fading as we walked into the hotel.  Laundry was across the street at a public coin laundry.  Usually the hotels have a coin or sometimes free laundry.  Usually, it costs ¥200; ¥300 occasionally and more often than that it is free.  Tonight it was ¥500.

For dinner we went to a different type of conveyor belt sushi.  We sat at a counter with a divider between us.  We each had out own ordering tablets. There were two level of conveyors and your food stopped in front of you.  It was actually pretty cool.  This sushi was also super cheap.  It wasn't that good but you could get a lot of it.  We had as much as we could eat and two beers for ¥3000 ($20).