AustLit

'A long day of road walking out of Tokushima. Twenty-five, twenty-six kilometres including five hundred metres of gravel before and after Temple 18. Rosie and I left the hotel at about 7:15am and walked along one of the main arterial roads. It was like walking from Perth to Armadale along Albany Highway during peak hour. Our main respite from the fumes and heat was a muffin meal at McDonald’s. We kept an eye out for a supermarket because we had been warned that there were no shops for three nights after Temple 19. Unable to read the billboards, we kept approaching what looked like a supermarket but they were either an Officeworks or casino. On the other side of a major intersection, with huge dump trucks idling, an industrial warehouse came into view and inside was the Food Garden where Rosie bought some sick tasting crab cheese sausage that we tried at a worker hut rest stop about eight kilometres later. Imagine a miner’s donga open and available to anyone passing by to help themselves to coffee and snacks. A couple of other Henro’s stopped while we were there. One tidied up and reorganised the slippers in the small vinyl entrance. A chatty guy arrived as we were leaving, taking to Rosie and giving her stories of life in the time I visited the port-a-loo out back.' (Introduction)