For this week's tips, pointers, and just advice, we'll call it. I still have to find a good name for this. I know I've said this now a couple of times. I've got to find a good name for these episodes.

Something a little catier than that. But we're bringing back a really good friend of this podcast,

and coincidentally, I'm recording this

on the three year anniversary.

It'll probably be a few weeks after the three anniversary,

if it happens to be the three year anniversary

of the Pop Bear Heights podcast. So I'd like to welcome back our friend Samir. Welcome back.

So Martin, it's nice to see you. Nice to be back on the podcast and excited to talk to you guys about,

not talking about any gear today specifically but just kind of want to talk about a trail I always had in the back of my my head that I love to I think not a lot of people know about and once people know about it they find it pretty interesting.

Yeah and you spoke a little bit about the trail you're going to cover and I

want to say this that you know we cover a lot of the trails here in the states, but we've been talking more and last time we were on we talked about a hike you did outside of the country that you did abroad and we've had a couple of people on over the summer.

So I think our listeners are really going to want to hear about this

trail that you're going to tell us about. So if you had heard my last episode, the last hike that I had done was

called the kumano koto in Japan and it's kind of like a anywhere from like 40 to 100, you know 20-ish miles depending on which route you take and it basically is just an ancient kind of hike over a thousand years old that visits different Buddhist temples in a mountain region in central southern Japan.

So this next trail I want to talk about,

it's actually a lot bigger version

of that kind of a same kind of a hike.

So it's called the Shikoku pilgrimage. Shikoku's an island, one of the, you know, smaller islands offset from Japan. It's a little bit more rural and it's kind of like there's a lot of like rice paddies kind of different cultural aspect to it but I was always

interested in this this hike the Chicago pilgrimage and so when I finished the kumano koto during the summer or during the spring I actually took a ferry to Shikoku to the first to the start I guess of this hike.

Basically it's an 800-ish mile, I think it's 745 miles, but obviously with any hike you end up hiking a lot more than you expect.

So around 800 miles and it basically is a loop that circumvents the island of Shikoku and it visits instead of like the hike I did which visited three Buddhist temples this one visits 88 temples so it's also called the 88 temple pilgrimage and it's like I'm Muslim and I did the

kumanakoto which is like a Buddhist pilgrimage and so I always even though it's not really my practice, I just find it interesting this idea of pilgrimage and, you know, kind of morphing the idea of a hike for fun really into some sort of spiritual awakening or aspect. So I always thought the Shokoku pilgrimage sounded really interesting.

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