April 21st started early with a bath and then breakfast and we were off to Yokomine ji. The day was sunny and the scenery beautiful, the temple was up in the hills and during the ride it often felt as if we were entering another world. You would get glimpses of hidden valleys, where you could live undiscovered for decades.I was so glad that we had come to Shikoku, it was turning out to be so different from anything else that I had experienced in Japan.And because it is off the beaten tourist path,very unspoiled.Unfortunately this did not extend to the temples themselves. After a certain time of morning there were always tourist buses outside the temples and people praying enmasse. But these "tour" henros didn't even get there own temple stamps. You would see their tour guide/driver carrying a huge bag of stamp books into the temple to get their stamp. You never wanted to be waiting after one of these guys, it takes a long time to write that much kanji and stamp each book.
As usual, I said a prayer for the day and left my name card. The Yoshida's kindly took us to Koon ji, (no.61). This was a strange temple, it looked more like a 1960's conference centre than a temple. Also it had 2 floors and the kamis (god statues) were actually on the 2nd floor, so technically worshippers weren"t really praying in the right direction.
We left the Yoshida's at Koon ji and we continued on foot, we had come to a small cluster of temples that we could walk to. So we went to Hoju ji (no.62), Kichijo ji (no.63) and Maegami ji (no.64). On the way to Maegami ji we were stopped by a couple and given money for ice cream. We thought that this meant we would be able to buy ice cream at Maegami ji, but that was not the case, we were very disappointed, but would save the money for ice cream.We camped by a lovely river, where we were given a bottle of soda by a guy walking his dog. We thought that he wanted to ask us to stay at his place, but maybe wasn't sure what his wife would think, so he didn't. No problem, we were happy to camp.