Taking the high road

If the misty mountains, crystal-clear waterfalls and soulful shrines don’t make you fall in love with Japan’s ancient Kiso Road (although, why wouldn’t they?), then the centuries-old inns, the warmth and hospitality of the people, and the incredible food certainly will.

- SUZY BROKENSHA

When South Africa won the Rugby World Cup in Japan last year I couldn’t have been happier – not only because our guys played so magnificently and

I love them all, obviously, but also because, in my view, we simply had no other option: the instant we beat the Japanese team, we just had to win the whole thing to make that defeat OK. This is not down to divided loyalties, this is about my total, all-consuming, teenage-style crush on Japan, the strangest, most interesting country I’ve ever been to.

Tokyo is as mesmerising as everyone says it is, and Kyoto possibly even more beautiful than it’s given credit for. But I think it was the five days I spent walking the Kiso Road that really turned me into a mooning adolescent.

The Kiso Road is part of the Nakasendo Way, an ancient trade route linking Tokyo with Kyoto (Japan’s original capital). At least two thousand years old, the road has been walked for centuries by samurai, pilgrims, warlords, loggers and anyone else with business to conduct or scores to settle. Sixty-nine post towns grew up along the way, all beautifully preserved – so beautifully preserved that it’s really only your fellow walkers and pilgrims that remind you that you’re living in the 21st century.

And there’s something about walking a country as opposed to training, bussing or driving through it. As anyone who’s walked the Camino will know, getting up every morning, putting on your boots and setting off on a road that has been walked for thousands of years by thousands of people somehow makes you part of the stream of history rather than simply an observer. It’s a mystical, powerful thing. I know that sounds wildly fanciful (cf: teenage crush), but it’s true.