Kumano Kodo The Short Version

It was a random weekend in 2020. I was nursing the ennui, a semi-permanent guest in my pandemic brain, when I read the first article about Kumano Kodo and proceeded to fall into the rabbit hole of the topic for the rest of the afternoon.

Eventually, I emerged into the living room and told Fafa, “Let’s do Kumano Kodo. I’ll invite Jik too!“.

Kumano Kodo at Last…

Three years, 276 runs and 8124km later, there I was, staring at the wooden sign Kumano Kodo while carrying an overweight backpack and wearing discounted hiking shoes.

”Ready?” Fafa asked. “Yep!” I replied, and off we went.

In my mind, the Kumano Kodo trail would be a mostly flat surface, as shown in many serene-looking scenery pics on the internet. In reality, it was climbing what felt like never-ending stairs up the hill into the mountains.

After less than an hour of trekking into the mountain, I drank my last drop of water, ignoring Fafa yelling at me not to finish it off so quickly. We walked (and rested many times — all at my request) and walked some more.

We had been at it for almost two hours, and I was pretty sure we were close to reaching our rest point of the day when we sighted the first milestone of the trail.

It said 0.7 km completed and 3km to go.

That was the exact moment my adventurous spirit broke. All I wanted was to return to the town we left earlier, to wallow in my premature failure with umeshu (for $1 a can, I could afford plenty). But we were in the middle of the forest; I wondered if a helicopter would pick people up if they were not injured — just severely ill-prepared.

Then I looked at Fafa, who was still walking before me. The man who repeatedly asked me, “Why do you want to do this?” months before the trip. I couldn’t do this to him, not after he reluctantly bought a hiking backpack a day before the trip and left his comfort zone to join me in this Kumano Kodo pilgrimage thingy just because I insisted on doing it. So I dragged my fat ass up the stairs, counting one step at a time.

Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, we made it into civilization with no single energy left to do anything but crash once we reached our inn.

That was day 1 of Kumano Kodo…

Day 2, 3, 4 and 5 got easier after I started carrying two water bottles and plenty of Onigiris for the road (but mainly because Fafa carried both our backpacks during uphill climbs).

Kumano Kodo didn’t turn out to be a life-changing trip I romanticized it to be, but it was definitely a trip of a lifetime — a bucket list item.

On the train back to Osaka, I thanked Fafa for doing it with me and suggested we do #caminodesantiago next. His reply: “Can we do what I want for once ?!!” Oh well…

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