Our Japanese trip includes four days of walking. I think it’s part of an old pilgrim’s trail, but I’m not absolutely certain about that, because I’ve left all the organisation to other people. I’m just concentrating on the language aspects (gulp).
Simon has been worried about whether we’re going to be able to cope with the hiking, as we’ve done no physical preparations at all. Hence, yesterday we did a local bush walk to assess our fitness, and whether we needed to panic or not.
This was the walk he chose.
It’s in the hills behind Waikanae. It’s only a 25 minute drive to the start of the walk, but because we were only going to go one way, we had to leave one car at the end, which entailed 90 minutes of driving for one, two hour walk. Still, the backroads were interesting.
Dogs were allowed on leads, so Ratdog and Goofy joined us. This was probably the longest walk either of them had done in their lives, and they coped very well.
The walk was more event filled than I anticipated. We almost got derailed at the very start, when Goofy was terrified by a narrow swing bridge at the first river crossing. Luckily her fear of being left behind overcame her fear of narrow swingy things over great heights, and she eventually made it across with an all-fours commando crawl. I was going to take a photo but I was too busy trying to coax her along – plus it seemed a mean thing to do when she was at her most vulnerable. She was much happier after that.
The first half was a beautiful and fairly straightforward bush walk, marred only by a small inoffensive dog coming the other way that Ratdog took great exception to. Maybe its innocent seeming exterior was hiding malevolent thoughts that only Ratdog could perceive. Anyway they went past with only a minimum of frenzied barking from our two and we proceeded on our way unmolested.
At the halfway point we got distracted by an open area with many felled trees, and ended up wandering too close to somebody’s house and three vicious attack dogs. It was mayhem for a while, I was more frightened than I’ve been of other dogs for a long while. Luckily Simon’s background of growing up on a farm stood him in good stead and he told them off firmly while I stood holding our dogs back and quivering in fear. Recognising a voice of authority, the other dogs ran back home and we were able to fall back, retracing our steps until we found the correct track again.
A little further on, we heard some scuffling in the undergrowth, which the dogs went to investigate, only to have a big black chicken fly out of the bushes and scuttle off back down the way we’d come, squawking angrily. This got the dogs very excited, and slowed us down considerably as they kept insisting on examining the shrubbery on the sides of the road for all the rest of the walk, in case we came across another magic chicken tree.
The second half of the walk was mostly downhill on a dirt road, which was fairly dull, even though the scenery was still beautiful.
We eventually got to the end, and luckily found my Tesla had been unmolested in the car park, drove back to the start to get the Volvo and then home.
I see now that Simon posted our walk on Strava, and it even has a sneaky photo of me! All is forgiven as I look good.
A fun day in the end, and most importantly not too physically demanding. I think we’re going to be fine in Japan.