Day 1 - Limited Trains and Adjusting To Walking All Day, Hot Springs Walking Tour Of Northern Japan
Day 1 - Limited Trains and Adjusting To Walking All Day, Hot Springs Walking Tour Of Northern Japan
We started the day with a delicious breakfast, selecting many autumn vegetables from the buffet, prepared in a variety of ways.
Some were steamed in a bamboo basket, some were pickled, some were raw and the root vegetables were boiled.
We also had some miso soup with local mushrooms, a small amount of steamed rice with a variety of seaweed, steamed tofu and other yummy choices.
We started walking early, by 8:30am, but with the sun, it already felt very hot.
We walked through rice fields and rural villages, which were not as scenic as the land around them.
None of the houses were built in the traditional Japanese style of wooden farmland houses with glorious roofs, which are very beautiful.
The houses we passed were cheaply built, characterless and utilitarian, devoid of beauty, and with little attention to details or thought to make them attractive to live in.
Occasionally, we walked by lovely gardens, full of well trimmed trees and plants.
To be truthful, it was hard to walk in the hot sun.
I am out of practice, after months of diving and walking no more than a kilometer or two per day.
The asphalt was so hot my feet started throbbing and I felt the onset of a blister under one foot.
Usually, it takes me between ten days and two weeks to adjust to walking all day long and starting to enjoy it.
My mind thinks of all the fun things I could do with my time and money, instead of getting overheated while walking down boring, uninspiring streets.
But I have learned that mental discipline is a big part of a walking pilgrimage.
The journey is not through the physical landscape of Japan, but an inner journey through my doubts, sabotaging thoughts, disbeliefs, fears and whatever it is that is keeping me away from full enlightenment and realization of my innate godly powers.
If I believe and think that I am just a small human in a mortal body that is subject to aging and the scars of the passing years, bound to suffer pain and die, then I am NOT an enlightened being, aware of my True Nature and Divine potential.
You cannot hold two contradictory belief systems at the same time. You are either a weak and fallible human being, or you are an immortal Spirit, eternal, powerful, full of grace, made of the essence of life itself.
We occupy many dimensions of being in a single day.
In higher dimensions, we vibrate on a higher frequency, and our bodies are more powerful, resilient, light filled and divine, because they are a reflection of our true identity in spirit.
When we choose anger, judgement of others, fears, hatred, frustrations, negative thoughts about the world and about ourselves, we manifest tiredness and fatigue, and that is a sign that we are occupying a lower vibrational frequency.
We took a brief rest stop, after about two and a half hours of walking, at a small park across from a Shinto shrine, to have a cup of our tea.
As I was pouring tea from our thermos, I noticed that there were too many huge mosquitoes around, the kind that you wouldn’t want to bite you because they were big enough to carry many dis-eases.
So we quickly packed up our backpacks and continued to walk.
A bit further on, we found a small cafe called the Sugar Cafe.
They had two stools available at the counter for us to sit on.
They weren’t the most comfortable seats in the house, but it was a very popular little place, and that was all that they had available for us.
Besides, seeking comfort on a walking pilgrimage only results in frustration , because there is so little comfort available when you are walking outdoors all day, carrying your backpack, exposed to the burning sun and the rain, walking slowly through areas that are not geared for comforts and luxury travels.
The cafe menu was very small.
They offer a few drinks and fluffy pancakes.
We’ve been to quite a few of these kinds of cafés before, where the menu features fluffy pancakes, and the clientele are almost all women.
They tend to linger over their pancakes and drinks, socializing and chatting with their friends for hours.
But I was feeling tired and very overheated, so we took a rest break there.
As I was sitting there, I realized that my original goal for today was way more ambitious than we could walk at the beginning of a pilgrimage.
I was hoping that we could walk a distance of more than 30 km, and that was not going to happen.
So far, it was noon, and we had only walked 10 km, which meant that we still had more than 20 km to go.
The walk was on paved hot sidewalks, quite flat, bordering rice fields and the streams that irrigate them.
Right now, the fields are golden and there’s a lot of rice ready to be harvested.
Because my foot was bothering me, we decided to only walk another 10 km, and then stop for the day.
The pancakes were indeed fluffy and delicious, baked in a pan a bit like a soufflé.
We walked for two more hours after the café and took the train back to Akita.
We stayed in Akita station to straighten out a little problem we had with our IC cards, and have some tea in the Starbucks.
This problem was something we had never encountered before.
IC cards are used all over Japan, while riding every kind of transportation, from buses, to subways to trains.
You simply scan your card on the card reader when you enter the train station or bus, and you scan it again upon exiting, and the cost of the ride is automatically deducted from your card balance.
The cards can be loaded with money at every convenience store and many train stations.
Except… that the train system in Northern Tohoku is not advanced enough to support the use of the IC cards.
We scanned them in Akita, but the rural train stations to the north take only cash and paper tickets.
Because we couldn’t scan the IC cards upon our exit, they were frozen and cannot be used.
At Akita station, we showed the paper tickets that we had paid for, and they unfroze our cards.
This pilgrimage is going to be a challenge.
To begin with, it was not at all easy for me to book accommodations along this route.
The area is remote with only a few choices of accommodations, and many of them do not show up on the booking sites that I have been using.
To solve this problem, whenever I did find a nice place along our walking route, I often booked two nights’ stay, with the idea that we would use it as a base to walk farther, and cover the distance between hotels over our two nights there.
But I wasn’t aware that the train lines in this region are very, very limited.
I am used to only an hourly train in many rural places in Japan, but I have not walked along a main route connecting cities like Akita, Hirosaki and Aomori, that has a train that runs only four times per day.
There are almost no local buses to support us and take us back to our accommodation after we finish our walking day.
Whenever there are trains, their schedules are very limited, and they seem to cater to the working locals, and not to anyone visiting the area to do any sightseeing, or for tourists.
This means that there is a train early in the morning at 6:00 am, for people going to work, and then there are two trains at night at 7PM and 7:50PM for those working late, and only a train or two in between.
Apparently, school children do not use these train lines, because the train schedule doesn’t run during the usual school hours.
Perhaps the parents use their cars to pick up and drop off their kids.
The daily planning of our walks has become a real task too, and instead of stressing over it, I decided to plan only one day at a time, hoping that a good solution will come to me.
An inner voice told me to trust the universe, and keep an open mind.
For the three days we are staying in Akita, the walk north and the return train to Akita are not an issue.
But our next hotel after we leave Akita is located in the town of Ogata, and we have no convenient way to get to our seaside hotel after completing a day of twenty kilometers’ walk north.
The hotel has outdated information on their website, saying that they no longer offer a shuttle bus from the train station, located almost 20 kilometers away from the hotel, but that there is a local bus which runs five times per day, that stops by the hotel.
I hoped that the bus still runs and that everything would be OK.
I was so tired when we reached our hotel.
Still feeling hot and not used to walking all day, I was so happy to take a hot bath and scrub off the remains of the day.
I fell asleep in the bathtub and woke up to rub my aching feet with tiger balm.
Sending you love and blessings,
Tali
Today’s Walk - 22 km.
Total walk to date - 29 km.
