Another morning, another run for the train past the numerous love hotels in our neighbourhood towards Juso station, where we always took the Hankyu Line train to Namba station. Today was sort of “figure things out on the go” sort of day, as we had slept in due to a tonne of walking the day prior, as well as only getting back to the apartment at like 9 or 10pm. As I frantically tried to work out how we would get there, turns out the fastest way was to take the private railway train to Koyasan which would have costed about 15 bucks each way. However, since we we’re being spiritual people and money is too materialistic for us to spend, we took the pilgrimage of JR trains to have the gods test our virtue of patience and boredom.
So, we ended up instead catching the Kuroshio limited express train from Tennoji to Wakayama which was like an hour scenic ride.
Ehh, not too bad. But, once we got to Wakayama the next local train to Hashimoto where we’d have to transfer onto the private railway anyways, was a good fifty minutes away or so. So, we had a toilet break, bought some food to eat quickly and aimlessly walked around to fill up the fifty minutes.
Oh, and the train was late too so that didn’t really help. We eventually hopped on the two carriage local train to Hashimoto, which was kind of like an old Tokyo subway train. Imagine Sydney x Japan sort of train. There was even like a bunch of parcels or something being carried on the train.
We passed through all the rural stations and towns, with all of the school kids and stuff hopping on and off even though it was like 12pm with all their sports and baseball gear. Finally we arrived at Hashimoto where we bought tickets for the train to Gokura-yama then got the cable car up to Koya-san.
Even there we had to buy an unlimited ticket for the bus for 10 bucks and had to catch a bus to the main town as you can’t walk it or anything.
What a chore thus far. Eventually we got off at the bus stop, and walked around the town and a bunch of shrines and stuff.
The atmosphere however was a lot more quiet and spiritual, with the place not really being that busy, only the occasional local tourist and monks were shuffling around town.
We somehow ended up going past the visitor centre and Charlie and myself got convinced into doing some sort of weird Shinto ceremony that would make you a “Buddhist”. During this weird ceremony, we got taken into an dark empty hall with a bunch of candles (sounds romantic dunnit?), and had to follow the head monks lead chants whilst we sat Japanese style with our bodies on our legs. Sadly, for me and my fat ass calves which had been walking for the last two weeks, this did not fare well as I had to constantly shuffle my weight around to not completely kill my calves. It sort of felt so spiritual, if I sat any other way I might be disrespectful or something. After 15 or 30 minutes of random chanting like some exortion ceremony or alike, we finally got up and walked out of the room. LOLJOKES, my calves were so dead I had to like crawl out of the room, and sat outside for a good 5 or 10 minutes trying to get blood back in my bloody cattle (too big for calves).
Eventually we met up with Nath, Kevin and Daniel and we headed for Okunion, which was some spooky spiritual graveyard thingo.
We had a walk inside and marvelled at all the statues and gravestones, complete with random bibs, toys and other items that just added to the damn scariness of the place. Like, not sure if it’s cute or just like creepy that there are spirits and stuff around.
We didn’t even bow when we entered like I saw in the video that the girls made but oh well, just we just angered all the spirits. About half way down, it sort of started raining so we just kinda bailed back to the bus stop and hopped on the bus back to the cable car.
This time, we had decided to get the private railway train the whole way back to avoid the whole ten million minute wait to transfer so we had to buy tickets to Osaka. And then there was the incident where Nathan just dumped all his coins on the counter hoping the attendant would count it for him who instead resoundingly took his wallet and searched it for a bigger note since the cable car had to leave. And I think the girls we met on the next train were behind us too.
So on the train back to Hashimoto, I had noticed a sorta cute Asian chick and her two other friends. 5 of us were just sitting, chilling, falling asleep when this big ass Japanese wasp flew into the train through a window or something, god knows what. We ended up moving away from it, whilst it just flew around the girls until the guard came out and killed it with some electrical swat I think. I remember telling Kevin, ‘ man I need to say something to these girls or sumthin when we leave the train’ and he’s like narrr go now so I somehow out of impulse just did. Started the convo about the bug, then Charlie came over and we started talking about what they were doing in Japan, what they were studying and Charlie’s art and shit.
When we got off the train at Hashimoto, Charlie intro’d the 3 chicks to the rest of the guys, which was sorta awks, since Charlie and I were doing most of the talking but it worked out. As we went on the long train back to Osaka, we were so involved in the conversation which involved Charlie showing them a photo of me sleeping among other things, we ended up just getting off at the terminus with them, with someone just casually saying ‘cya’ before we got up and left the train. That was like the most awks goodbye, so I chased them down and left them with a proper gentlemans farewell with the whole nice to meet you guys etc etc, even though we were meant to meet them at the festival the next day.
So, we backtracked on the train back to Namba where we had a discussion about Charlie’s dogshot, how random it was etc etc, while we discussed plans to meet tomorrow for the festival throughout the night.
Overall, when you look back, the only way we could have met them was for all of the variables to fall into place which they did, so it was fortunate I was impulsive enough and the coincidence for us to meet up with some random travel buddies.
Vid below for reference
Mr Wang Blogs 