Day 4

Because of our inability to get a reservation at Temple #12, we had to wait one day with nothing special to do. We got up in the morning and after a leisurely breakfast at our hotel (seen in the picture above) we went shopping. After wandering around a bit we found a shopping center and bought some of the things that we needed. The most urgent was some way to keep our packs dry. After the drizzle of the last few days, we realized that we should have bought rain covers for the packs. Ian bought the last plastic poncho that the stores had and I decided to use a large plastic trash bag and tape the edges. I will have more to say about how these worked out later in the trip.

We returned to last night's family restaurant for lunch and bought more cakes at the bread shop. We had the cakes with coffee in the hotel and then, after a rest, we walked to a 7/11, or maybe it was a Lawson's, I don't remember, where we bought food for the next day. I bought three daifuku, a ball of sweet bean paste inside a rice covering, two chocolate bars and a bottle of Aquarius, a sports drink. This would have to do for lunches on the next two days. I would have like to have taken more but I did not want to carry the extra weight, knowing that we were going into some rough mountains.

At the hotel, over more coffee, we planned out the rest of the trip and made some reservations. For the first time we realized that due to the time limits imposed by Ian's university, we would not be able to get past Kochi city.
This is another view of our hotel. The main road is about 50 meters behind me.


This is another picture of the Buddhist paraphenalia that we carried. The light red books is for the temple stamps, the white sheets of paper are given as offerings, the yellow box contained incense, the blue box candles, and the dark red book contains the Heart Sutra among other things.

At this point I was a bit anxious because I knew that tomorrow I would be going into the mountains, where there was absolutely nothing but a trail. I also knew from the maps that in the 12 kilometers (as the crow flies) we would climb for an altitude of 40 meters up to 750 or so before dropping down 450 meters and then climbing again to over 700 - all of this on dirt trails. Luckily I did not know how hard it was actually going to be. If I had, I would have been more than anxious.