The final leg of our trip ended in Kochi prefecture. (To see the other three parts, see my three previous blog posts.) Kochi is famous for bonito tuna, yuzu and historically it was one of the main exporters of traditional paper. With this in mind, we started this part of our adventure by going to the prefectural paper museum. Here, we learnt how paper used to be made and got to make some paper ourselves. While it was drying, we explored the rest of the exhibits and also got to do some stencilling on some larger, thicker, traditional paper. Sammy chose the kanji for blessing/fortune for his design and I chose the picture of what I thought was a phoenix, but ended up being Kochi’s mascot of a rooster/chicken with a long tail. Either way, it was a magical bird with a really long tail, sat on a perch – what’s not to love? We hope to get the pictures framed and put up as artwork in our home as a reminder of this wonderful trip.
Once the paper was dry, we got to look at a load of traditional stamps and make designs on our paper to turn them into cute postcards. I cannot wait to send them to all our nieces and nephews in the new year. They get postcards from us all the time but it’s so rare to receive one on fancy paper that your uncle and auntie has made! Hope they love them as much as we do.
After the museum we headed to the local shrine, finally got a goshuin to mark our trip – considering how many shrines we’d been to, we couldn’t believe this ended up being our first one! It ended up being a cute one, and it was boarded on yellow, a first for our collection. Shikoku island (where we were driving around) is famous for a great pilgrimage of 80 shrines. Many people travel the island to collect all 80 goshuin, so it seemed only appropriate that we got at least one while we were there. We then picked up a coffee from a small local cafe, so small in fact it really just felt like somebody’s house, then we headed to the hotel. We quickly changed into yukata once more and headed to the onsen to unwind. In that hotel, I went in the onsen both in the evening and the morning of the next day, like I did in the previous hotel too, but in this one, they had two different onsen which they seemed to switch between each day. What this meant is that the onsen that Sammy went in during the evening, was the one I went in the following morning (and vice versa). It was a nice little surprise. A nice touch to an already lovely stay.
We explored Kochi city the following day, going to a nice cafe and getting sweet oat-milk drinks for our breakfast before going hunting for final souvenirs. We walked around the castle grounds a bit too, and we were lucky that there was a special makers market on that day, lining many of the streets for miles. We wandered up and down the stalls, pointing at all the fresh food we’d buy if we lived in the area, before ending up at a donburi restaurant. As I mentioned in many previous blogs, Sammy and I consider ourselves vegan, because we are as much as we possibly can be. I cook at home every part of every meal pretty much every day, and even prepare food when we go away for day trips or a weekend. However, when we go on extended holidays in Japan, we have to eat fish sometimes as I have allergies to milk and soy. 99.9% of vegan food here is made of soy (either soy meat alternatives or some form of tofu). Even vegetable-only dishes contain soy sauce or miso and it’s very very hard to find anywhere that will just leave the soy out. I still search high and low just in case, but when we’re left with no other option, we have to eat raw fish. Basically because cooked fish usually also contains soy and raw fish is just fish and rice typically. So yes, there are a couple of pictures of our food. Yes, it is fish. Yes, I still consider us vegan. You can call us what you like ha.
Once we’d finished eating and shopping, we fueled up the car and headed to the rental garage. Then we got ready for our flight home. It had been a very busy holiday, so we were so exhausted when we got sat down after security. Everything had been so good though, so we were grateful for the experiences. The flight went smoothly too, only the trains from Narita home were a bit of a pain, taking longer to get from Chiba to East Tokyo than it did from Kochi to Narita, but in the end we got home safe and not too late. We took the curry out of the freezer that I had made on the previous Monday especially for this purpose. We talked about our highlights of the trip over tea, sent family and friends messages about the trip and that we were home safe, before turning the conversation to the question: where’s next?
