Day 54: Koyasan

We left Osaka for the 2 hour train, cable car, and bus to Koyasan which is where Kobo Daishi lies in eternal meditation. As such it is the most holy place of his Buddhist sect which practices Shingon Buddhism.

Along the way we saw a solar installation and small mountain towns. The train has to crawl up a steep gorge then we transferred to the cable car to the top of Mt Koya.

Koyasan, a world heritage site, has 117 temples, 51 of which offer lodging, and the largest graveyard in Japan. Many of the temples and gates are much larger than anything we saw on Shikoku.

The graveyard had family graves over a thousand years old alongside newer memorials from companies like Panasonic.

There were also some crazy ones like this one that people use makeup on and another inside a tree trunk.

One thing I noticed here and at the last few temples we visited on Shikoku, was the mixture of Buddhist and Shinto symbols such as torii gates in a Buddhist temple.

After walking for a bit we had vegan ramen for lunch and were surprised by osettai from the owner.

In the evening, we had a vegan dinner in our room served the traditional way without a table.

This is the end of the Shikoku Pilgrimage trip.  I walked around 1300km with 20000m of ascent over 53 days.  I wore out one pair of shoes and got a good start on wearing out a second pair.