(My article on Japan’s Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage trail – published in Suitcase Magazine #16, September 2016)

I arrived to the town by foot, emerging from the land of ghosts. As I materialized out of the thick forest and crossed a high cement bridge into a small village called Chikatsuyu, I suddenly became self-conscious of the dirt smeared across my face, the brambles caught in my hair and the vagabond look that glowed out from my eyes. It was a strange feeling. This town meant humans. Civilization. The world of neon lights and supermarket packaged goods I’d need to enter to cook dinner in my homestay that night. I didn’t feel human. After three days hiking through the sacred, otherworldly mountains behind me, I had begun to believe in the kami spirits that were said to reside amongst the rocks, animals, streams and trees; in my crazier moments, I’ll admit that I very possibly began speaking out loud to them too.

A few hours’ train ride south of Kyoto lies one of the world’s most ancient pilgrimage routes, the Kumano Kodo. Hundreds of narrow trails that wind through the dense, mystical mountains of the Kii peninsula, the Kumano Kodo is a fascinating fusion of Japanese Shintoism and Buddhist beliefs. Buddhism was introduced to Japan from China in the sixth Century and instead of ousting the de facto religion pervasive across the country – Shintoism – the locals combined them to create a unique fusion of beliefs. Shintoism reveres natural features such as mountains, forests, stones and plants as gods, and believes them to hold kami spirits. As a nature lover, this particularly echoed with me.

These faiths beckoned to me – their concepts of the endless flow of life and death, of hidden energies that swirl all around us, connectivity between beings and worlds inside of ourselves we don’t even know exist. And so, when I was traveling through Japan last April I decided it was time to explore these sides of myself; I figured that doing a solo pilgrimage through the Kumano Kodo would be a pretty good start. I liked the idea that pilgrimages are about a tangible passage into the sacred realm – that there is such a thing as a physical way to uncover your own spirituality. A walking pilgrimage like the Kumano Kodo unites divine belief with physical action, transformation through the exertion of the body towards spiritual goals.

In Japanese, the word for ‘walk’ is synonymous with the word for Buddhist practice – the walker is thus a practitioner, and his faith is the path. As I was soon to learn, the gradual act of walking amongst these holy mountains slowly would sink into my psyche, and as I wandered along the paths in deathly silence a few days later, the spindly boughs of the tall cedar trees swaying and groaning above me like brittle doors, I certainly felt that I was in the presence of something ethereal. Every step was bringing me deeper into the world of spirits.

I set out on my first day of the Kumano Kodo from Kii Tanabe and spent the night in a traditional ryokan (a Japanese inn), where I woke myself up at the break of dawn to watch from my futon on the floor as the thick mists that coated the mountains overnight dissolved to reveal the forests below. I thought to myself that if spirits had to choose one place on earth as to reside in, this would definitely be it. I took a hot bath in the ryokan’s steaming onsen springs, nibbled half-heartedly on a pungent Japanese breakfast of caramelized soy fish and miso soup, heaved my backpack on and set out.

The trail started right by the ryokan and the morning was mild, sunlit and warm. About an hour into the hike I passed a stream on my right that reflected the pale cherry blossoms and burgundy leaves like watercolor. The trees here were surreal. Incredibly tall and yet hardly a hand’s width in diameter, I held my palm on one as I looked up and wondered how the thin trunks could possibly manage to hold up such weight. The ground under my feet was damp from a night of rain and formed a dark red blanket that smelled of wet earth and tan moss. As the thin trail wound up the mountain, birdsong echoed between the trees and I tried not to slip on the tree roots which poked out everywhere and formed geometric shapes of veins and organs and deer horns.

Later that morning I came across my first shrine. There’s something intimately pure and touching about the simplicity of a Shinto shrine. They’re small, usually made out of stone or wood and decorated with scattered coins, cups of tea, blankets to keep the spirits warm and other trinkets that pilgrims offer on their way past. These shrines in particular, oji shrines, are unique to the Kumano Kodo. Their origins are said to lie with the Yamabushi mountain ascetics who historically served as pilgrimage guides, and they both house the deities of the pilgrimage and serve as places of worship and rest. As I placed a coin in the wicker basket and its metallic clink sounded out across the hushed forest, I meditated on the fact that the same action had probably been performed by countless pilgrims – from retired emperors to samurais and rural farmers – who had walked these paths for thousands of years. In their time, they would have undertaken rigorous rites of worship and purification like cold water ablution, followed by elaborate ceremonies of sutras, prayers, dancing, sumo and poetry. It felt odd, and somehow comforting, to be a part of them.

My moment of serenity was disturbed by a screaming pack of uniformed school girls who were quickly coming up the path towards me. I was a little annoyed, which felt wrong seeing as I was supposed to be in a zen state of pilgrimage and all, but as they passed by they stopped and chatted to me for a while, offering me some of their dried fruit and nuts and even helped me to book a homestay in the next town (this was all done with seven mobile phones being frantically typed away at and handed around with animated phone calls I had no chance of understanding).

I asked them to explain the dieties of the shrines to me, and they told me that the kami come in many forms, such as the landscape, forces of nature, spirits of clan ancestors, cheeky (and sometimes wicked) beings or deceased souls, and all together are manifestations of musubi, the interconnecting harmonizing energy of the universe. Kami are believed to be “hidden” from this world and inhabit a complementary existence that mirrors our own. When you walk through their lands, it is said that entering in harmony with the awe inspiring aspects of nature is to be conscious of kannagara no mich – the way of the kami. After the girls had continued on their hike, speeding through the trails ahead of me, I gazed around, at the bright white and yellow orchids which quivered on an imperceptible breeze, and listened to the tinkle of a faraway waterfall. I tried to turn off my thinking mind and enter into kannagara no mich.

A few days before, this state of mind had come to me in a cemetery in Koyasan. A Buddhist temple complex perched atop an alpine basin, Koyasan was founded twelve centuries ago by one of the most famous monks in the history of Japan and the father of the Shingon school of Buddhism, Kobo Daishi (in true manner of the greats of old, he was also an engineer, calligrapher and poet). Today, it’s reachable by a creaky old cable car and is the place in Japan to sleep in a Buddhist monastery, indulge in delectable kaseiki meals cooked by Buddhist monks and watch their morning ceremonies. It’s also home to a vast cemetery called Okuno-in and I walked in reverent silence as I passed under colossal five-hundred-year old cedar trees and over 300,000 mossy, glistening statues, altars and tombstones called gorintō. Gorintō are composed of five pieces which represent the Buddhist philosophy of the five elements – a cube (earth, stability), a sphere (water, flow), a triangle (fire and intention), a crescent (wind, the expansive mind) and a lotus flower (ether and spirits). The entire cemetery, with its ancient trees and labyrinthine paths, vibrated with a profound and overwhelming energy.

I had come to a clearing in the uppermost point of the Koyasan path. The sunlight dappled in coral tones through the leaves overhead and their shimmering reflections made me feel like I was swimming in a fluid nebula of light. Dazed, I strolled off the main path into another smaller clearing, lay down my bag and stretched my aching back, and then some disrant reflections caught my eye that really shouldn’t have been there. They were in a part of the forest just beyond the clearing that was shrouded in shadow, but there they were again, darting lights that I could only catch out of the corner of my eye, like when you look at the night sky to watch stars on the periphery of your vision. I tried this experiment a few times until I was convinced I wasn’t hallucinating, and then walked over to them. Closer to the source, the lights were less strong but my hairs were standing on end as if all the air around me was electrified. I wasn’t scared. I felt the right thing to was to offer a token of respect, and I took some beads out of my pocket and placed them on the ground, and said, “Thank you”. It might have just been some weird tricks of light, but inside I know what I felt was altogether different. When I cleared out my backpack that evening, I found some colorful, mottled green stones lying right on top of my clothes; I had never seen them before. There could be an explanation for this too, but I’ll choose the element of magic. I have them piled up on my nightstand to remind me, every day.

Right before nightfall, I heard a sudden noise right behind me. I whirled around, my heart pounding, because although it’s said to be a rare phenomenon it would be just my luck to come across a bear whilst hiking alone on an isolated mountain path. Instead however, I saw a short, slim Japanese man dressed in white pilgrim robes with a walking stick and a conical straw hat marching up behind me, eyes doggedly fixed on the road. As he passed me, he turned, looked surprised and asked me, “You so tall, where you from?”. To which I grinned and answered, “Switzerland… A little far from home.” He loved that. His entire face lit up as he exclaimed, “SWI-ZA-LAND! I went there last summer – the Matternhorn, I climbed Matterhorn!”. The conversation continued like this for a while until we bid each other goodbye, and I smiled at myself thinking that here I was on his mountain, and he on mine…

It has been said that hiking or walking for days on end is one of the best ways to get acquainted with your own neuroses. I agree, but would add to that. When the local spiritual beliefs of a place or country inspire you to consider the existence of other forms of energy, of other beings, parallel worlds that constantly brush up against ours, it does begin to shake up your own philosophy. Who knows? Many times I found myself staring into the distance, hearing strange sounds, constantly feeling I was in the presence of something else but just my own two feet on those mountain paths. I think I may have begun to believe in the way of the kami.