Day 61: Halloween scares & unexpected kindness
It's Halloween evening here in Japan, and I am in my bunk in Shizuoka. There are definitely a fair number of people out dressed up for revelries despite the weeknight timing. And it's after dark that one normally associates all the scares of Halloween, but this year I got more than my fill in broad daylight.
I have been looking forward to walking this section leading to Shizuoka for a few days now. The forecast was looking like sunny weather, and I had a stretch of Pacific coastline to follow for the a good part of the day. It seemed like an excellent confluence of factors coming together.
This morning I set out and found the weather to be just perfect. The morning was warm, but overcast, as as the day progressed the clouds melted away leaving huge swathes of blue sky.
The first half of my walk was mundane, moving through rural towns, with houses and farms lining my path. I stopped for my first break outside a Family Mart, which was near the coast, and situated between a fish monger and a fish smoking plant.
From here I was a stones throw from the ocean, and had seen it many times crossing inlets along the way. But ahead of me the coast wasn't what I has expected.
When I planned my route, the roadway was directly next to the water, and I had foolishly failed to pay attention to any indication of elevation along my planned course. I had seen that there were tunnels along the route, but it looked like there was possible alternatives to avoid them.
At no point in my planning did I stop to think "why are there tunnels along the beach?", but I really should have.
Leaving the Family Mart I noticed that my coastal road was headed straight towards the hills, and checking the map to make sure I hadn't strayed from my path, I realized that things were going to be a bit more elevated than I had expected a road immediately on the ocean to be.
My course was clear, and I followed the winding roads up the hills, finding small buildings and curious sights as I went.
Eventually I reached the mouth of the main tunnel on my route. I had looked at the satellite view the previous day and saw an unmarked road rather than the tunnel, and began looking for how to access it.
There was a large hotel at the top of the hill above the tunnel that seemed to border with the unmarked road in the satellite shots, so I hiked up to try and find a way through.
Upon reaching the top I found myself in the parking lot of a magnificently located hotel, with one side looking down over the city I had just acended from, and the other facing the ocean.
As I crossed the parking lot in search of my way forward to the mystery road, a woman standing next to the hotel shuttle came over to talk with me. She has a small amount of English, and she pointed out the where to get the best view over the ocean and towards Shizuoka.
She asked where I was from, and I explained that I was from Canada, pointing to the pin on my pack strap. She was curious about my pack, as she is likely used to seeing tourists with more conventional luggage in her shuttle bus. With a simple patter I related that I was hiking from Osaka to Tokyo, and was greeted with a now familiar look of shock. Which, really, is a pretty sane reaction to a thing like this I suppose.
I motioned to my phone, pointing to the satellite map of the mystery road, and asked if there was a way to it. She furrowed her brow and have me crossed fingers, which I have come to recognize as "not going to happen" in many situations. She pointed to the big tunnel on my map, the one I hoped to avoid, and did her best to make it clear that was the way to go. I thanked her for her help and headed back down the way I came, back to the entrance of the tunnel.
As I was walking towards the tunnel, I spotted a second one, set back down an overgrown road, and through it the access to my secret road... behind a padlocked fence. It seemed that I had no choice now but to take the long tunnel if I wanted to keep going.
Making my way to the tunnel I was happy to find that there was reasonably sized sidewalks, making the trip through the 900 metre-long tube significantly less dangerous.
This was a long, boring and intensely noisy kilometer. And certainly my least favourite of any kilometre I had done up to this point. But I was unaware how quickly that dubious honour was about to change hands.
As I left the tunnel, and the incredible noise of the passing traffic inside of it behind, I stepped off the road and onto an overgrown side road. It was the other end of my mystery road, also barricaded to prevent access.
Turning back to the main road I saw a runner approaching, headed in the opposite direction from me. I waited for him to pass before stepping back on to the road, as the shoulder was quite narrow and there was not room for two people to pass without risking traffic.
He passed and we exchanged friendly konnichiwas, and I looked forward, getting a hint of what was to come. Very narrow shoulders against vertical walls and ocean cliffs that were routinely overgrown and pushing me out in to the narrow mountain road frequented by commuting traffic.
I put on a brave face and headed down the road, but no sooner than I had started did I hear a voice calling out behind me. The runner was returning, beaconing me to talk.
He had a concerned look and asked if I was alright, which was probably a fair response to the look of frustration and concern on my face given the road ahead. He asked where I was going, and I told him I was going through to Shizuoka. This prompted a serious but respectful reaction, and he told me that I needed to be careful. This road was 3 - 4km long, and busy, lots of cars, very narrow.
While this wasn't exactly music to my ears, I did appreciate the kindness, and his attempt to prepare me for what was to come. It was clear that he ran here often, so I felt that he knew what he was talking about and I didn't take the warning lightly.
I thanked him for his help, and he smiled and wished me luck as he and returned to his running, quickly disappearing into the tunnel I had just left.
What came next was a long, harrowing and stressful walk, that quickly made the long and noisy tunnel feel like a warm and fuzzy memory.
Typically I prefer to walk on the side of the road that has me walking towards oncoming traffic. This gives me the ability to see a possible danger coming and manage it.
Unfortunately, headed east meant that would put me on the cliff side of the road. And while this side always had guard rails up, it also had essentially no shoulder whatsoever. This put me on the inside of the road, with traffic at my back.
Now, I have come to trust Japanese drivers a lot. They are incredibly patient, diligent and accommodating. But there is a significant difference between walking long country roads and city streets where I am easily spotted and given room, and the winding and blind-corner infested nightmare I found myself on now.
I would spend the next couple of hours covering a distance that should have taken half that time. The shoulder on the inside of the road was regularly overgrown, so I would walk and run from one clear section to the next a couple hundred meters away, then stop to listen for possible traffic before repeating.
The road was incredibly serpentine, as mountain roads tend to be, and the lush and dense forest made it so that I wasn't easily seen until drivers where damn near on top of me.
Each jump past overgrowth spiked my adrenaline, which is excellent in the moment, but constantly taking hits of adrenaline was slowly becoming just as exhausting as running up a mountain road with a 25 pound bag on my back was.
On top of the blind corners and desperate scurrying, there were further tunnels to contend with, and these ones were seemingly older and built to a code that didn't require sidewalks or shoulders. There were only a few like this, and thankfully they were only may 100-200 meters long. One frantic sprint during a break in traffic had me through them and out of danger before the next car arrived.
Add to all of that the psychological exhaustion. Each sprint was a gamble, and the running itself made such a racket with my bag behind me that I was near deaf to if there was a car approaching behind. So with each risky moves, on ever more tired legs, without the ability to know if I was in danger until it was too late, it was all beginning to fray my nerves.
I was about three quarters through my personal Halloween nightmare when a quick shoulder check caught an entirely unexpected sight; the runner from earlier was on his way back, and practically right behind me.
He approached with a warm smile and slowed to walk beside me at my pace, seemingly unfazed by the fact we were on a narrow mountain road. He was very comfortable here, and that lent me a lot of comfort as well.
We continued down the road together, and he kindly and inquisitively asked me all sort of questions about where I was from and why I was here. I did my best to hold a conversation, but it was all I could do to answer his questions. My normally strong conversation skills lost in a haze of stress.
After about 15 minutes walking together, the runner set out to continue at his pace. But before he left I reached into my bag and gave him a small Canada flag pin I had with me as a token of thanks. For him this was a slow break in his run, but for me having a companion for a short while helped take the edge off my mind.
As I produced the pin from my bag it was greeted with a large smile, and the runner asked if I had Facebook and if he could add me. I would come to know that his name was Minoru, and he kindly told me that if I was in trouble to please call him and he would help me.
With that, he set off down the road at a run, giving a wave before disappearing around the next tight bend in the road. I was once again on my own.
I pressed forwards and soon found myself starting at the last tunnel on my route, and I did not like the looks of it at all.
This tunnel was long and dark, with a bend in it that left the end out of sight. The white line indicating my narrow shoulder quickly veered into the wall. I realised immediately the perils ahead. Once I entered into this tunnel I would have no safe space to walk, I would be shrouded in darkness, and soon hidden from a long view by the bends in the tunnel.
I trust the drivers in Japan generally. They are very safe drivers generally. But it only takes one not so great driver to make everything VERY bad for me in these next few moments, a thought that propelled my already tired legs once the next break in traffic came.
Even before I started on this section of mountain road, I already had walked about 20km. My legs were already tiring before any of this began. There wasn't a budget for running wildly headlong downhill in a dark and windy tunnel.
I was literally running on empty.
But fear is an incredibly powerful motivator, and in that moment I was ostensibly running for my life. Half way down, as I heard the roar of vehicles entering the tunnel behind me suddenly build, I found that my legs were moving with newfound energy.
I focused as hard as I could on each step. The asphalt was rough and broken along the edge of the tunnel, the sort of thing that my partially crippled left foot has tripped and sprained on a thousand times at walking speed.
Rolling my ankle here, at the speed simply wasn't an option. I would do serious damage just from the impact with the rough and well worn roadway, let alone the fact I might be nearly invisible in that dark tunnel to the cars bearing down on me.
My mind focused only on my feet. Each step was vital. Three cars rushed passed, close, in quick succession and then exited the tunnel moments later, leaving the whole place silent as I reached the end, entirely exhausted.
At the end of the tunnel there was a pull off for service vehicles, as the tunnel emptied out almost immediately on to a bridge. I walked over to the large concrete pad, dropped my bag against the outside of the tunnel and collapsed beside it.
My legs were wobbly and undulating with the rhythm of my pulse. I was happy to rest, and even happier to see the outskirts of Shizuoka just around the corner past this coming bridge. I sat for a time to let my legs cool and recharge.
I had shown my route to my wife last night, and she had spotted this bridge that flew out over the water in an arch away from the land, not bridging two shores but skipping out for a moment off of one. We both thought it looked like a neat part of the route on paper. In practice it was the last stressful hurdle to getting into town.
After I had recovered from my frantic run I set out across the bridge. With high rails and shoulders no more than a foot wide, the bridge lost all its appeal once I saw it in person.
Mercifully traffic was almost silent in that moment, and the last hurdle was cleared without incident. I walked the last few hundred metres past the bridge and hopped a guard rail onto a service road the first chance I got.
From here I still had 6 - 7km to go to reach my hostel. There was a clear route to take to get me there, and in that moment I couldn't have given a shit about following it. I was finally on the coast I thought I would be walking, and I was going to take the long way for a while.
As I wandered down that road, looking out over the water, I felt for the first time how intensely knotted my guts were, and I was hit with a wave of emotion that was laugh, cry and puke all at the same time. Thankfully only doing a bit of the first two.
I set out with high hopes for my day, and it turned out to be the single most stressful day on my journey. I hated the last few hours intensely, but also saw a humour in it all at the same time.
And as those emotions spilled out of me and I unwound from it all, an unexpected message pinged into my phone; Minoru was checking in to see if I was alright and where I was.
I let him know I was on the coast now, and thanked him for walking with me down that stressful road. He was gracious and kind in his response.
A few minutes later, as I continued my stroll down the coast I was greeted with an unexpected sight; Minoru was jogging my way, and he came bearing gifts of his own.
This was entirely unexpected, and I was blown away by the kindness he has once again shown me, a total stranger. We talked again for a moment before he turned to resume running, when I stopped him and asked for one last favour: a photo!
With that Minoru jogged off for the last time, and I was left to sit and drink my tea and look back at the now setting sun and the path I had just taken.
There was still a lot of ground left to cover before I would be able to set my pack down for the night and relax, and I decided while I was sitting there that I had done enough that day. I grabbed my gifts and walked to the local train station, riding the train the last few kilometres. Twenty minutes later I was climbing the stairs to my hostel.
I have been looking forward to walking this section leading to Shizuoka for a few days now. The forecast was looking like sunny weather, and I had a stretch of Pacific coastline to follow for the a good part of the day. It seemed like an excellent confluence of factors coming together.
This morning I set out and found the weather to be just perfect. The morning was warm, but overcast, as as the day progressed the clouds melted away leaving huge swathes of blue sky.
The first half of my walk was mundane, moving through rural towns, with houses and farms lining my path. I stopped for my first break outside a Family Mart, which was near the coast, and situated between a fish monger and a fish smoking plant.
The odor was unbelievably strong and inescapable!
From here I was a stones throw from the ocean, and had seen it many times crossing inlets along the way. But ahead of me the coast wasn't what I has expected.
When I planned my route, the roadway was directly next to the water, and I had foolishly failed to pay attention to any indication of elevation along my planned course. I had seen that there were tunnels along the route, but it looked like there was possible alternatives to avoid them.
At no point in my planning did I stop to think "why are there tunnels along the beach?", but I really should have.
Leaving the Family Mart I noticed that my coastal road was headed straight towards the hills, and checking the map to make sure I hadn't strayed from my path, I realized that things were going to be a bit more elevated than I had expected a road immediately on the ocean to be.
So much for a long flat road along the ocean!
My course was clear, and I followed the winding roads up the hills, finding small buildings and curious sights as I went.
Hidden on a stairway behind buildings, out of sight from practically everything.
Eventually I reached the mouth of the main tunnel on my route. I had looked at the satellite view the previous day and saw an unmarked road rather than the tunnel, and began looking for how to access it.
There was a large hotel at the top of the hill above the tunnel that seemed to border with the unmarked road in the satellite shots, so I hiked up to try and find a way through.
Upon reaching the top I found myself in the parking lot of a magnificently located hotel, with one side looking down over the city I had just acended from, and the other facing the ocean.
The view backward and down.
As I crossed the parking lot in search of my way forward to the mystery road, a woman standing next to the hotel shuttle came over to talk with me. She has a small amount of English, and she pointed out the where to get the best view over the ocean and towards Shizuoka.
She asked where I was from, and I explained that I was from Canada, pointing to the pin on my pack strap. She was curious about my pack, as she is likely used to seeing tourists with more conventional luggage in her shuttle bus. With a simple patter I related that I was hiking from Osaka to Tokyo, and was greeted with a now familiar look of shock. Which, really, is a pretty sane reaction to a thing like this I suppose.
I motioned to my phone, pointing to the satellite map of the mystery road, and asked if there was a way to it. She furrowed her brow and have me crossed fingers, which I have come to recognize as "not going to happen" in many situations. She pointed to the big tunnel on my map, the one I hoped to avoid, and did her best to make it clear that was the way to go. I thanked her for her help and headed back down the way I came, back to the entrance of the tunnel.
As I was walking towards the tunnel, I spotted a second one, set back down an overgrown road, and through it the access to my secret road... behind a padlocked fence. It seemed that I had no choice now but to take the long tunnel if I wanted to keep going.
Making my way to the tunnel I was happy to find that there was reasonably sized sidewalks, making the trip through the 900 metre-long tube significantly less dangerous.
The sidewalks are a comfortable meter+ wide.
This was a long, boring and intensely noisy kilometer. And certainly my least favourite of any kilometre I had done up to this point. But I was unaware how quickly that dubious honour was about to change hands.
Light at the end of the tunnel is even better in practice than rhetoric!
As I left the tunnel, and the incredible noise of the passing traffic inside of it behind, I stepped off the road and onto an overgrown side road. It was the other end of my mystery road, also barricaded to prevent access.
Turning back to the main road I saw a runner approaching, headed in the opposite direction from me. I waited for him to pass before stepping back on to the road, as the shoulder was quite narrow and there was not room for two people to pass without risking traffic.
He passed and we exchanged friendly konnichiwas, and I looked forward, getting a hint of what was to come. Very narrow shoulders against vertical walls and ocean cliffs that were routinely overgrown and pushing me out in to the narrow mountain road frequented by commuting traffic.
I put on a brave face and headed down the road, but no sooner than I had started did I hear a voice calling out behind me. The runner was returning, beaconing me to talk.
He had a concerned look and asked if I was alright, which was probably a fair response to the look of frustration and concern on my face given the road ahead. He asked where I was going, and I told him I was going through to Shizuoka. This prompted a serious but respectful reaction, and he told me that I needed to be careful. This road was 3 - 4km long, and busy, lots of cars, very narrow.
While this wasn't exactly music to my ears, I did appreciate the kindness, and his attempt to prepare me for what was to come. It was clear that he ran here often, so I felt that he knew what he was talking about and I didn't take the warning lightly.
I thanked him for his help, and he smiled and wished me luck as he and returned to his running, quickly disappearing into the tunnel I had just left.
What came next was a long, harrowing and stressful walk, that quickly made the long and noisy tunnel feel like a warm and fuzzy memory.
Typically I prefer to walk on the side of the road that has me walking towards oncoming traffic. This gives me the ability to see a possible danger coming and manage it.
Unfortunately, headed east meant that would put me on the cliff side of the road. And while this side always had guard rails up, it also had essentially no shoulder whatsoever. This put me on the inside of the road, with traffic at my back.
Now, I have come to trust Japanese drivers a lot. They are incredibly patient, diligent and accommodating. But there is a significant difference between walking long country roads and city streets where I am easily spotted and given room, and the winding and blind-corner infested nightmare I found myself on now.
I would spend the next couple of hours covering a distance that should have taken half that time. The shoulder on the inside of the road was regularly overgrown, so I would walk and run from one clear section to the next a couple hundred meters away, then stop to listen for possible traffic before repeating.
The road was incredibly serpentine, as mountain roads tend to be, and the lush and dense forest made it so that I wasn't easily seen until drivers where damn near on top of me.
Each jump past overgrowth spiked my adrenaline, which is excellent in the moment, but constantly taking hits of adrenaline was slowly becoming just as exhausting as running up a mountain road with a 25 pound bag on my back was.
On top of the blind corners and desperate scurrying, there were further tunnels to contend with, and these ones were seemingly older and built to a code that didn't require sidewalks or shoulders. There were only a few like this, and thankfully they were only may 100-200 meters long. One frantic sprint during a break in traffic had me through them and out of danger before the next car arrived.
Add to all of that the psychological exhaustion. Each sprint was a gamble, and the running itself made such a racket with my bag behind me that I was near deaf to if there was a car approaching behind. So with each risky moves, on ever more tired legs, without the ability to know if I was in danger until it was too late, it was all beginning to fray my nerves.
I was about three quarters through my personal Halloween nightmare when a quick shoulder check caught an entirely unexpected sight; the runner from earlier was on his way back, and practically right behind me.
He approached with a warm smile and slowed to walk beside me at my pace, seemingly unfazed by the fact we were on a narrow mountain road. He was very comfortable here, and that lent me a lot of comfort as well.
We continued down the road together, and he kindly and inquisitively asked me all sort of questions about where I was from and why I was here. I did my best to hold a conversation, but it was all I could do to answer his questions. My normally strong conversation skills lost in a haze of stress.
After about 15 minutes walking together, the runner set out to continue at his pace. But before he left I reached into my bag and gave him a small Canada flag pin I had with me as a token of thanks. For him this was a slow break in his run, but for me having a companion for a short while helped take the edge off my mind.
As I produced the pin from my bag it was greeted with a large smile, and the runner asked if I had Facebook and if he could add me. I would come to know that his name was Minoru, and he kindly told me that if I was in trouble to please call him and he would help me.
With that, he set off down the road at a run, giving a wave before disappearing around the next tight bend in the road. I was once again on my own.
I pressed forwards and soon found myself starting at the last tunnel on my route, and I did not like the looks of it at all.
This tunnel was long and dark, with a bend in it that left the end out of sight. The white line indicating my narrow shoulder quickly veered into the wall. I realised immediately the perils ahead. Once I entered into this tunnel I would have no safe space to walk, I would be shrouded in darkness, and soon hidden from a long view by the bends in the tunnel.
I trust the drivers in Japan generally. They are very safe drivers generally. But it only takes one not so great driver to make everything VERY bad for me in these next few moments, a thought that propelled my already tired legs once the next break in traffic came.
Even before I started on this section of mountain road, I already had walked about 20km. My legs were already tiring before any of this began. There wasn't a budget for running wildly headlong downhill in a dark and windy tunnel.
I was literally running on empty.
But fear is an incredibly powerful motivator, and in that moment I was ostensibly running for my life. Half way down, as I heard the roar of vehicles entering the tunnel behind me suddenly build, I found that my legs were moving with newfound energy.
I focused as hard as I could on each step. The asphalt was rough and broken along the edge of the tunnel, the sort of thing that my partially crippled left foot has tripped and sprained on a thousand times at walking speed.
Rolling my ankle here, at the speed simply wasn't an option. I would do serious damage just from the impact with the rough and well worn roadway, let alone the fact I might be nearly invisible in that dark tunnel to the cars bearing down on me.
My mind focused only on my feet. Each step was vital. Three cars rushed passed, close, in quick succession and then exited the tunnel moments later, leaving the whole place silent as I reached the end, entirely exhausted.
At the end of the tunnel there was a pull off for service vehicles, as the tunnel emptied out almost immediately on to a bridge. I walked over to the large concrete pad, dropped my bag against the outside of the tunnel and collapsed beside it.
My legs were wobbly and undulating with the rhythm of my pulse. I was happy to rest, and even happier to see the outskirts of Shizuoka just around the corner past this coming bridge. I sat for a time to let my legs cool and recharge.
I had shown my route to my wife last night, and she had spotted this bridge that flew out over the water in an arch away from the land, not bridging two shores but skipping out for a moment off of one. We both thought it looked like a neat part of the route on paper. In practice it was the last stressful hurdle to getting into town.
After I had recovered from my frantic run I set out across the bridge. With high rails and shoulders no more than a foot wide, the bridge lost all its appeal once I saw it in person.
Mercifully traffic was almost silent in that moment, and the last hurdle was cleared without incident. I walked the last few hundred metres past the bridge and hopped a guard rail onto a service road the first chance I got.
From here I still had 6 - 7km to go to reach my hostel. There was a clear route to take to get me there, and in that moment I couldn't have given a shit about following it. I was finally on the coast I thought I would be walking, and I was going to take the long way for a while.
As I wandered down that road, looking out over the water, I felt for the first time how intensely knotted my guts were, and I was hit with a wave of emotion that was laugh, cry and puke all at the same time. Thankfully only doing a bit of the first two.
I set out with high hopes for my day, and it turned out to be the single most stressful day on my journey. I hated the last few hours intensely, but also saw a humour in it all at the same time.
And as those emotions spilled out of me and I unwound from it all, an unexpected message pinged into my phone; Minoru was checking in to see if I was alright and where I was.
I let him know I was on the coast now, and thanked him for walking with me down that stressful road. He was gracious and kind in his response.
A few minutes later, as I continued my stroll down the coast I was greeted with an unexpected sight; Minoru was jogging my way, and he came bearing gifts of his own.
Green tea and food for me!
This was entirely unexpected, and I was blown away by the kindness he has once again shown me, a total stranger. We talked again for a moment before he turned to resume running, when I stopped him and asked for one last favour: a photo!
There was still a lot of ground left to cover before I would be able to set my pack down for the night and relax, and I decided while I was sitting there that I had done enough that day. I grabbed my gifts and walked to the local train station, riding the train the last few kilometres. Twenty minutes later I was climbing the stairs to my hostel.
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