Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks

Dogojima day 4: Minamigata to Misakimachi
Friday, 8 March 2024

Today: 43462 steps/33.02 km/20.52 mi/6h 3m
Total: 110213 steps/84.63 km/52.59 mi/15h 25m

I've never seen a day with so many abrupt weather changes, and I grew up in the Boston area.

The Hotel Uneri gave me four choices for a breakfast time, ranging from 6:45 to 8:00. I picked 7:30, to encourage myself to get out early — but still sleep enough — and in the hopes that one of the middle options would mean I wouldn't be eating by myself.

I came downstairs in the yukata and slippers provided in my room, after making the mild faux pas of wearing street clothes at dinner. Of the 15 or so people in the dining room for the evening meal, only two others had worn street attire, and none had worn shoes. One couple had bought me a drink — a second grapefruit highball — having felt an affinity with me as an English speaker because they have a British son-in-law. But they refused to let me return the favor. Dinner, as spelled out in a wallet-sized folding paper menu, was a seafood course with sashimi, snails, chawanmushi, and the ubiquitous sea cucumber, followed by tempura, soba, and sea-bream kamameshi (rice cooked in an iron pot).

So I donned the proper attire for breakfast, only to find everyone else in the hallways and lobby in street clothes. They had already eaten and checked out; perhaps they were riding the hotel van to the port for the morning fast ferry.

Back in my room, I saw that it was raining. I checked the forecast: a 90-percent rain chance in the 10:00 hour, then cloudy but mostly dry. I couldn't wait until 11:00 to leave. I had more than 30 kilometers to go, and if I made it through 20 of them by 1:30, there was a place where I could have lunch.

I looked again a few minutes later and the rain had stopped. The clouds had broken and the sky was blue. I took my chance, but I kept the poncho handy.

The Hotel Uneri sits between two of Dogojima's longest tunnels: the 646.6-meter one at the end of yesterday's walk and the 688-meter one about a kilometer into today's. Along with the hotel are a few points of interest between the tunnels. Sightseeing boats leave in the late afternoon for views of Candle Island, where a candle-shaped sea stack looks to be aflame when the sun sets. Behind the hotel, there's the Fukaura Waterfall. And around a bulge of land across from the hotel are the narrow Fukuura Tunnels, dug by hand starting in the late 19th century but, sadly, now observable only from the outside.

After the long tunnel, the road climbed and the wind howled. The sky was suddenly almost black. I put the poncho on just as little beads of hail began to fall. Very few cars came by. I felt small, as though I'd left civilization behind and now belonged to nature. The precipitation increased in velocity and turned to snow: big flakes that didn't accumulate. They were flying fast, at a slant in the wind.

The second tunnel sneaked up on me, and I was grateful for it. It was not, however, my favorite tunnel. It was poorly lit, and some of the blocks on the walkway were loose and wet.

But it was a tunnel to salvation, a tunnel of mercy. When I came out the other end, three minutes later, there was no snow, the sky was clearing, and instead of the rattle of my poncho I heard the chirping of birds. I looked back at the mountain I'd just passed through, and the sun was brightening it from left to right, as if opening a screen door.

I crossed the Yui River. At least I wasn't here at the end of August in 2007. A record rainfall poured down then, peaking at more than half a foot an hour, washing out roads and sending debris down the river.

I took a short pause at Yui Pond, which was created from a landslide and is deceptively deep, with dead leaves and other wetland debris sticking out and forming a floating island in its center. From here, the road began another climb; a sign specified an 8-percent grade. Spring was trying to break through here, with pink and yellow-and-white blossoms lining the road to the third tunnel of the day.

The rain came back as I reached tunnel number four, and I paused before exiting. Five minutes later I could continue without getting wet. As I descended into Tsuma, the siziest town I'd seen since I left Saigo Port behind, it was almost warm enough for me to lose a layer.

Dogojima is known for its bullfighting — bull against bull, without humans. Tsuma has a bullring, but the closest I saw to a battle was the statue of two head-butting bulls by the bay. A pretty walk around the bay, with a turtle-shaped promontory in view, brought me to the Nagi restaurant just as the wind and rain started up again.

The mixed-grill lunch was all over the map: a seasoned pork chop, fried chicken, breaded pork, a meatball with a few curls of spaghetti; but also rice, vinegared vegetables, chawanmushi, and miso soup.

As I finished, the building rattled, and a windswept rain began. I headed to the vestibule, preparing to ask whether I could wait it out, as the place was closing. But by the time I got there, it had stopped, and the sun was shining.

It was very windy, though. I climbed up to tunnel number lucky five (555 meters long, 5.5 meters wide) and once again the sky turned dark, followed by the beady hail and quick snowfall. I put the poncho back on and a few minutes later the snow stopped. There was now a sidewalk, indicating that I was just a few kilometers away from Okinoshima town and Saigo Port.

But I had one more bulge of land to cover. Oki Airport is south of Okinoshima's center, and it has two flights day: one to nearby Izumo — the plane is in the air less than 20 minutes — and one to Osaka. My lodging for tonight, B-Stone Garden, was just beyond the airport on this bulge; the direct route would have had me walk through a tunnel under the runway, but I took a lonely road around it, closer to the coast and through a village. In the distance, two men were attending to a lighthouse.

I was less than 15 minutes away, and the sky was mostly clear as I proceeded along the coastal road, the runway high above me. I took my poncho off. A rainbow arc appeared ahead of me.

Then the rainbow was swallowed by clouds, the skies opened again, and I had to fiddle with the poncho to get it back on, less than a kilometer from my destination. I managed to get it on backwards, so I couldn't use the hood without suffocating myself. It also meant I'd want to take it off before I saw anyone at the B-Stone Garden.

A car came up behind me, the only one I saw on this lonely road. "Are you all right?" the driver asked.

"I'm OK, thank you."

"Where are you going?"

"B-Stone."

"Ah! Come with me."

"It's all right, I'd like to walk."

He turned out, of course, to be the receptionist at the B-Stone Garden. The room was small and chilly, but the dinner was ample, a grill-it-myself plate of beef, pork, sausage, salmon, squid, a shrimp, mushrooms, eggplant, onion, pepper, and pumpkin. There was an oyster in its shell, and I contemplated having it raw, but then I put it over the flame for a minute. Half-grilled, it was exceptional, I must say.

When I sat down to dinner, it was snowing quickly. I took a sip of sake and looked out again to see dry air, a partly cloudy sky, and the end of the sunset in the distance. And after another sip, rain.

Go on to Dogojima day 5