Tokushima

Day 20 of our Shikoku Pilgrimage marked both a return and a beginning. With all travel logistics finally behind us, we could focus only on walking — and what a stage to start with. The mountain routes leading to T20, between T20 and T21, and on toward T22 are known among pilgrims as some of the toughest and most beautiful in all Shikoku, but for us they were also home ground: the trails we helped clear and walked countless times with local volunteers. This day brought steep climbs, stone-paved relics, and quiet villages we knew by heart — and an encounter that, though we didn’t know it then, would quietly weave itself back into our later pilgrimage. It was a proper farewell to the mountains where our pilgrimage life once began.

Day 20 continued with the climb through Shikoku’s oldest recorded pilgrim trail, the Kamo-michi, and the long descent from T21 Tairyuji down the mountain. Between 14th-century stone markers and legends of flying monks and crawling rocks, the day was full of history and humor. We passed white limestone slopes, sacred halls, and the peaceful forests where Kūkai once trained, before tackling the forgotten Kitaji-michi—rough, unmarked, and silent except for wind and cedar. By sunset we reached our inn at the foot of the mountain, ending one of the toughest yet most beautiful days of the pilgrimage.