My Japanese is pretty good after 40 years of study. Some days it is really good and I can see the pleasure my conversants have that we are speaking about all kinds of matters without hindrance. Some days, however, I am reminded of how many limits I still have. Lately, when we have reached the top of some relentless uphill climb, I have heard my Japanese fellow pilgrims use a word I’ve heard often but rarely used myself: “shindoi.” “Right,” I think. “There’s a word I should use more often.”

Dictionaries tell us it means “tired,” “frazzled,” “draining,” or “worrisome.” All of these work, but don’t really carry the force of the word when I hear it exchanged between pilgrims after a tough climb. More colloquial translations—“rough” or “ass-kicking”—feel more right to me in the contexts in which I hear it on this trip.

Elevation charts of the entire path of the pilgrimage provided by the indispensable Miyashita Naoyuki, in his Shikoku Japan 88 Route Guide, show lots of flat terrain to traverse, but Tokushima Prefecture, the first of our four, show some of the most violent rises and falls to and from some of the greatest heights of the whole pilgrimage. If you start at Temple 1 and move clockwise through the pilgrimage, as we did, it appears that you start with some of the toughest terrain of the whole walk at that point in time when, if you are like us, you are least tempered for the whole ordeal. The fact that I, a nearly sixty year-old man, am still walking suggests that my training until now wasn’t insufficient. But I was definitely not practicing what we’ve encountered.

We began our trip by walking west upriver, along the foothills of the mountains on the north side of the Yoshino River, the largest river in Shikoku. Temples 1 through 10 line that northern valley edge for about 24 miles or so. Along the way, Temples 4, 8 and 10 call upon the pilgrims to excurse into the foothills of the mountains enough to make the thighs burn and the lungs chuff.  At Temple 4, Dainichi-ji, the head priest spoke wistfully about being in a temple at the entrance to the “lonely” mountains. At Temple 8, Kumadani-ji (Bear Valley Temple), Sam and I reminisced about climbing the 250 stairs to Tanukidanizan (Badger Valley Mountain) in Kyoto, and moaned quietly about these deceptively named “animal valley” temples that were really climbs to heights. Having experienced the jaunts uphill at Temples 4 and 8, the climb to Temple 10, Kirihata-ji, was a wake-up slap. We ruefully realized too late that we had missed our chance to leave our heavy packs at a kindly storekeeper’s shop when, after climbing a long hill from the entryway, we hit the bottom of a staircase that warned us that we had 330 steps to go to the top.

Nevertheless, in all of these cases, we still had enough wits about us to laugh about the endless staircases and yet climb even more when we reached the top. Temple 10, for example, invited us to climb 100 more steps above the Main Hall to view a nearly derelict pagoda, originally built in 1617 and transported from Osaka to this remote valley location in the 1880s. We accepted that invitation and took some great pictures.

But throughout the walk from Temples 1 through 10, the mountains on the south side of the valley loomed menacingly. We knew we’d end up going there. They looked much taller than the ones we were skirting and we’d heard stories from friends, like Jody, and fellow pilgrims, that the walk to Temple 12, in those south-side mountains, was the big test. On day two, having walked from Temple 1 to just beyond Temple 7, we limped into our lodgings after 16.5 miles of walking through cold, blustery landscapes, our staff-holding hands nearly blue from the chilling wind. But as our bodies tired on that day, I couldn’t keep my eyes off those southern mountains, foreboding.

The next day, after expending ourselves to ascend to Kirihataji, a sublime space we were reluctant to leave, we descended the hill knowing we now had to traverse that wide valley to our lodgings in the southern foothills. Our first days had a clear pattern. Starting with a chill temperature, but a bright sun, we began our walk in a brisk air with the warmth of a promising sun. In the early afternoon, however, the clouds rolled in inevitably from the west and the wind picked up, dropping the wind chill back down toward 0 Celsius. This third day of walking fit that pattern exactly. We descended from Temple 10 around 3 pm, with another two hours to go to the far side, farther, in fact, than we expected and had to lean into the cold wind as we trudged along a heavily trafficked road to a long bridge across a river plain. We were both broken, in feet, calves and spirit by the time we reached our inn, Ryokan Yoshida, just 500 meters from Temple 11. This was not a good state to be in before the most notorious stretch of pilgrim path in the whole pilgrimage: the “pilgrim collapsing” mountain road from Temple 11 to Temple 12.

We got up the next morning and ate every piece of food on the breakfast plate offered by the innkeeper, gladly accepting, as well, the rice balls (two) and pickles he offered for the trip to Temple 12, a passage with no opportunities to resupply either food or water. We walked the short path to Temple 11, Fujiidera, enjoying the optimistic blossoming plum trees along the way. But after finishing our rituals at the temple, I stood at the entrance to the mountain path and strained to remember just how hard this path was.

I came on this pilgrimage with an expectation of recall and completion. I had walked temples 1 through 23 in 1983, after all. In this first stretch, I was looking for scenes I could remember and, to be honest, could find very few. Whether I have a poor memory of my younger days, or was likely to forget the most trying things, there was only one spot where I felt the force of memory: a spot up the first rise from which one could overlook the whole Yoshino River valley that we’d just walked. The rest was a blur and I soon understood why.

The path from Temple 11 to Temple 12 features six portions that are labeled “pilgrim tumbling” (henro korogashi) sections. These are the portions of the path that break the body and the will. As we climbed the first of these sections, beginning within 50 meters of leaving Temple 11, we could still laugh—bitterly, but laughing all the same—but this turned out to be a trail that tested both the body and the will. As Jody had told us, this was “the real deal.”

The path to Temple 12 climbs a mountain of 2000 feet (granted, not a mountain in the Sierra Nevadas, or Rockies, but save your scoffs until you walk this trail), then descends, only to rise again to a peak at 2500 feet to descend again, to ascend one more time to 2200 feet.  Each ascent and descent has a “pilgrim collapsing” (a better translation than ‘tumbling,’” IMHO) portion. Each climb was relentless and heart-breaking. Each descent—with knee-shocking drops, ankle-twisting rocks and roots and slopes that jammed our toes painfully to the front of our shoes—made us with we were ascending instead.

On the fifth “collapsing” path, we were taking a break on the side of the path, kicking our heels into the dirt to try to force our toes away from the point of our shoes, when an older man came around the corner above us, lightly jogging, with just a shoulder bag and a broad-brimmed sedge hat. He paused when  he reached us and said, with a big smile, “That was rough, wasn’t it?”

”Sure was!” I said, forcing a chipper tone into my voice.

”You’re going down now and then you’ll have to climb one more time,” he said with a grin.

”Yeah,” I said. “But the next ‘up’ can’t be as bad as the last one,” jauntiness now betraying a bit of a whine.

”Its worse,” he chuckled, and then continued jogging on down a hill Sam and I were picking our way down carefully, with grimaces and grunts.

He was right. The final climb up to Temple 12 was a monster. The path twisted up the mountainside but not, amazingly, to render the incline more gentle. Each turn simply revealed another steep ascent, turning my exhalations into choked-off curses of “MOTHER———!” or “Son of a———!” (It didn’t seem right to go full-on with obscene language on the sacred mountain). I went up in bursts, stopping every 20 yards at most, to look behind at Sam trudging like a chain gang prisoner.

It turns out that while we were hitting our physical walls, Sam was hitting a mental wall as well. It wasn’t just the relentless climbs. In fact, it was more the patterns of light created by the relatively young cedars that formed a mono-crop on the hillsides. Ramrod straight, with branches reaching out from about 20 feet up the trunk, the cedar forest composed a visual environment of bars of light and dark that could easily seem endless. Sam was having a cedar forest version of the vertigo some of us get when we contemplate the depth of the ocean or the infinity of space. He found himself sinking into a kind of fugue state with no apparent end.

Then he remembered a brass bell we bought at the store at the entrance to the climb up to Temple 10. We’d heard good things about the couple running the store, and we needed some new supplies anyway (a new incense box for Sam, for example), so we had made sure to go to them with our business. While Sam was looking around the store, I saw the brass bells and recalled that I’d had one when I walked the pilgrimage the first time. I’d actually lingered over one at the store up on Mt. Koya where we’d first supplied ourselves, but had passed on them at the time. They were a little more money than I wanted to spend and they could be pretty loud and annoying. But suddenly I thought we should have at least one…for who knows why.

Now, on that last “Henro Collapsing” path up to Temple 12, Sam asked me to pull the bell out of my bag. He took it in his free hand and resumed climbing and, as he did so, the bell clapper did its work, delivering a crisp jangly chime. Sam began to revive and as we neared the top the “son of a———” passed me, reminding me that age will tell. Later, as we descended toward our inn in the Kamiyama valley below, he described to me how the cedars had closed in on him and his mind held tight to the bars of light and dark until the chiming of the bell gave him an out, something else to turn his attention to. The only practical use I’d had in mind for the bell when I put it next to the register was that it might be good to have something making noise in the mountains if we wanted to keep the bears, wild boars or monkeys away. It turned out to save Sam’s mind.

The pilgrimage runs through four prefectures and Miyashita tells us in his guide book that each of the prefectures is akin to a kind of Buddhist training. Tokushima is the “place of spiritual awakening,” Kochi is the “place of ascetic training,” Ehime is the “place of enlightenment,” and Kagawa is the “place of nirvana.” I finish this post in our first inn in Kochi Prefecture, looking back on Tokushima as a mix of exciting encounters and daily trials. We survived Temple 12 (I’ll tell the legend of the temple in an different post) and although we’ve been told by many that if you make it to 12 you’ll make it all the way around, it has been hard to shake the exhaustion of that climb. Other days generated their own kinds of exhaustions: tired feet, aching hips, sunburned hands, and stiff shoulders. The day we climbed to the top of a mountain for Temple 20, Kakurinji, then descended into a valley for another climb immediately up to Temple 21, was nearly as hard as the climb to Temple 12. Sweating profusely, my heart pounding in my ears…this was only bearable because I knew these mountains were ending soon.

As we trudged mile fifteen of the day toward our inn today, again the first inn in a new prefecture, I was walking about 10 yards ahead of Sam who was in conversation with a Japanese man we’d fallen in with a few miles back. The man was asking Sam how he liked the pilgrimage. Sam answered that we were having a lot of interesting experiences, but my ears pricked up especially when he said, “It is a lot harder than I’d been expecting. It’s definitely worth it. But it’s really hard.”

Yeah, I thought. I’ll have to teach him the word “shindoi.” He already knows what it means.