88 Temple Shikoku Pilgrimage - Day 5

Day 5 - Wednesday, 2016-04-06

Iya Valley

After a good traditional Japanese breakfast we boarded our bus carrying a bento box of food prepared by the hotel for our lunch. Today we are not walking the pilgrimage trail, we are going to a nature preserve about 2 hours away by bus and we are going to hike a pair of steep mountains. Two members of our group decided to take a rest day, one was the oldest member of our group (in her eighties) and the other was the youngest member, resting his blister ravaged feet.

The bus took us to the trailhead at about 1,200m altitude. We have to climb 755 meters (about 2,500 feet) to the top of Tsurugi-san, one of Shikoku’s sacred mountains and the island’s second highest.

This sign at the trailhead warned us to what awaited us:



And the climbing begins:



We huffed and puffed our way to the top of the mountain, it took us 2 hrs to get there and we felt a celebratory picture was in order:

Delio and Erico at the mountain top.

The area circled by the rope in the picture above demarcates the very top of the mountain and the abode of the mountain deity.

We had our lunch at the mountaintop and hiked to the summit of Jirogyu mountain, a bit lower than this one, but still the third highest in the island, about 6Km away.

Ahead,the summit of the Jirogyu mountain:



And in the background is the summit from which we came.



Up we go:




We made it:





Group picture (minus three):



And now we head back to the trailhead and the bus:

On the way to the hotel we stopped at a place in a deep valley with a couple of vine rope bridges with wooden slats to cross the river to the other side..The bridges are called  Okuiya Kazurabash and have been built and rebuilt in this spot for centuries. It was an interesting experience crossing the swaying bridge above the river and rocks below!

Bridge detail:

There are two bridges almost side by side, the higher one is nicked - named the “man’s bridge”:

And the lower one is the “woman’s bridge” because being lower, it less scary:

We arrived back at the hotel at the Iya Valley and we dashed to the onsen to clean up and to soak up our tired muscles in the soothing hot water before the 7 PM dinner. Dinner was again a multi-course affair of typical Japanese. Food with many different colors, textures, flavors and cooking methods. Most of the dishes were quite delicious, but some were a bit foreign to me - a bit gooey or with artificial looking colors.