These Walking Dreams: Day 39 (May 21, 2017)

Isfahan may be half the world but the Pacific Ocean is surely the other half, and at Naruto its gargantuan mass squeezes through a gap barely a kilometer wide. My walk across Shikoku over, I sailed into this Japanese Charybdis on a small boat, the dark water a protean horror show. The ocean rose out of itself in patches the size of tennis courts, smooth as a high-end ice cube, the edges churning into the depths. Across the strait, the fields of Awaji smelled of sun and sweet onions.

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

This was the third of seven days when I didn’t walk every step of the way. The only way to avoid taking a vehicle here would have been to take an entirely different route across Western Japan. It was only when I arrived in Tokushima that I found out that there is no ferry service across the Naruto Strait and also that pedestrian traffic is not allowed on the Great Naruto Bridge. I did the closest thing I could: I took a sightseeing boat halfway across the strait, into the whirlpools, then I was driven across the bridge by my friend Yoshihara Hitoshi.↩︎

🏙Hachiman, Tokushima City → Naruto, Tokushima → ⛴ Naruto Whirlpools → 🚗 Great Naruto Bridge → South Awaji City, Awaji Island, Hyōgo