Hiking no more

We are in the city of Matsuyama in northern Shikoku taking a few days off from travelling. It looks like our hiking days in Japan are over because Pawel slipped on a steep trail a few days ago and is injured. It's only a pull or tear in his quad muscle but he won't be climbing any mountains for awhile. Our hiking trip has now become a backpacking trip, which is fine with me because I've seen many beautiful natural sights in Japan and now I'd like to spend some time experiencing more of the cultural side. That said, we spent today visiting a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple in Dogo. As you can see from the pictures the Buddhist temple was very ecclectic and is considered to be one of the most unusual ones in Shikoku. There was a secret passage behind one of the main buildings that led to a tunnel through the hillside. It was filled with stone and gold Buddhas and ended in an eerie garden. At the end of the garden was a big gold dome (that looked like a UFO) which was filled with all these crazy looking wooden Buddhas. The whole experience was surreal. After walking back down the hill we had some beer then took a dip in the royal family's onsen. Tomorrow we will take the train down the southern cape of the island and take a whale-watching tour, then head back toward the center of the island to the Iya valley.

Here are some highlights from the last few days. We took a sand-bath in Ibusuki, where we put on a yukata (cotton robe) then lay on the hot sands with a view of the ocean while an attendant burried each of us with more sand. This was actually really nice but the sand was something like 50 degrees C so I lasted less than 15 minutes. It was really cool to see all these heads sticking out of the sand in neat rows along the beach. Afterward there was a lovely onsen and a cyprus sauna with the Olympis playing on TV. The steam in the sauna was extremely hot, but it smelled amazing.

We spent a couple of days on the island of Yakushima, where we hiked in the most incredible forest I have ever seen. The rainfall there is between 4 and 10 meters per year so conditions are perfect for the trees to grow to be thousands of years old (called Yaku-sugi). The entire forest is a tangle of vines and trees growing on other huge trees, all is covered with moss and the rivers are strewn with boulders and rocks. Trees are growing on the stumps of giant cedars that were cut down 400 years ago. We saw 7 or 8 trees that were over 2000 years old, around 30 m high and 9-10 m in diameter. We even saw wild deer on the trail and monkeys by the side of the road. The whole place was unreal, I felt like I was on the set of Lord of the Rings.

I've included a bunch more pictures for your viewing pleasure, let me know what you think. Talk to you soon!