Day 4: Seki - Shono (15km)

I woke at 3am and read until 4am. I then went back to sleep until six. At seven I went down for breakfast. It was a buffet but there was no bread in sight. Instead, there was a large rice cooker, a big vat of miso soup, and an array of Japanese dishes. Not my ideal breakfast, but it was all so elegantly presented with lacquerware trays and lovely Japanese pottery plates that I ended up enjoying it. At least they had coffee. I would have been very annoyed if they didn’t have coffee.

My toe didn't feel particularly sore. I was too scared to look at it, though, and so I left the bandage I'd applied the night before on and set off at 9am on what was one of my shorter days.

Nomura Ichirizuka (the tree, a muku, is said to be over 400 years old)

It was already warm when I left and was unpleasantly hot by the time I reached the post town of Kameyama. Thankfully, however, there was a cool breeze blowing where I stopped by a river on the outskirts of the town for my first break of the day. My groin didn’t hurt (I'd taken a Nurofen before setting off), and apart from the odd twinge in my toe I felt in pretty good condition. Soon after setting off again, while passing through Kameyama, I came across a group of 15-20 elderly hikers coming the other way. I said "Konnichiwa" but none of them seemed interested in stopping to chat.

A route marker dating from 1690

I was away from the main road for most of the day, following the Suzuka River as it meandered its way east towards the coast. At 11.30am I started looking for a lunch place. My mind must have been on food and not on my surroundings, because when I came to a bridge and checked my map I realized I'd missed a turn. My map did show a bridge, but its orientation didn’t match that of the bridge in front of me. I took out my compass for the very first time and was able to confirm that I was indeed in the wrong place. I turned around and walked back a few hundred metres before stopping to ask a farmer for directions. He was very friendly (he mentioned that he'd recently been to Australia) and told me how to get back onto the Tokaido.

A traditional kura (storehouse) near Shono. Note the fancy windows.

I arrived in Shono at 12.45pm, having failed to find a lunch place along the way. I'd also run out of water, and was in two minds as to whether I should walk around trying to find a restaurant or a convenience store in Shono (it was only a small town and I couldn’t even see a vending machine) or cross the Suzuka River into the city of Suzuka, where I'd booked a hotel for the night. I decided on the latter option, and soon came across a convenience store where I bought a bottle of water and a slice of fruitcake, which I wolfed down. I continued on to the hotel, which was further away than I thought it would be. It was too early to check in, so I continued walking until I found a shopping mall and had lunch at a restaurant inside the mall. When I finished lunch it was still only 2pm. To kill more time I stopped at a Mister Donut where I had a donut and two glasses of iced coffee. At 3pm I went back to the hotel and checked in. The young receptionist was very friendly and eager to help me (I figured he was either new or hadn't dealt with many foreigners before, or perhaps both).

I rested for a while and then hand-washed a couple of T-shirts. My mind then turned to dinner. There weren't many places to eat in the immediate vicinity of the hotel other than izakaya, which are mostly for drinking, so I walked along to a big shopping mall I’d passed earlier in the afternoon. I wondered around looking at the shops for a while. There seemed to be a sizable Brazilian population in Suzuka, probably related to the fact that there was a big Honda factory in the city. I found a Cappriciosa where I ordered a Margherita pizza and a glass of white wine (my first wine since leaving New Zealand) followed by a cup of tea. I then went back to my hotel and watched TV until going to bed.