Kanazawa to the Shonai plain: reserve sixteen nights along the Sea of Japan coast

What this line actually is

One coast, taken in order, with the sea on your left the whole way. It begins in a castle town on the plain, where two teahouse districts and a merchant quarter came through the war intact, and where the hot spring villages twenty minutes inland still work as spa towns for people from the cities rather than for foreigners. It goes on to a peninsula of terraced rice, salt pans worked by hand on the shore, and lacquer benches in village workshops. It ends on a rice plain under three mountains that have been walked as a set for something like fourteen hundred years, one of them reached by a stone stair of about two thousand four hundred steps under cedar. The three parts differ in kind, not in degree. That is the argument for taking them in one run.

How the three parts join up

Part one to part two is short: half a day of road along the shore and over the neck of the peninsula, which carries a move mark of 2. Nothing is lost to it. Part two to part three is the long one, marked 4, a night in transit, because the coast road bends far inland around a large bay and the leg is run overnight so the morning is not eaten by it. You sleep on the move and start the cedar stair the next day, which is the right order, since the stair is easier on legs that have not just spent six hours sitting down. Between parts, luggage goes ahead by road and meets you, so the night in pilgrim lodging is done with a small bag. Nothing between the three parts is left to you to arrange.

Taking one part and not the chain

Each of the three is sold on its own and priced on its own. The castle town with the hot spring villages is six nights, from $1,980 per person. The peninsula is five nights, from $1,740 per person. The mountains and the rice plain are five nights, from $1,860 per person. This office will not tell you that one of them is better than another, or that the chain is better than a part, because that is not a thing anyone here can know about your two weeks. What it will say is factual: the peninsula has the fewest fixed times and the most road, the mountains hold the hardest single day, and the castle town is the only part where a wet week costs you nothing at all.

Adding the three figures together

From $1,980, from $1,740 and from $1,860 per person add to from $5,580 per person, which is the line figure exactly. Taking the chain buys nothing off and adds nothing on; this office deducts nothing for the length and charges nothing for the convenience, and says so plainly here because it would be easy to assume otherwise. All figures are per person in US dollars, two sharing a double room. Inside them: sixteen nights of rooms, including one night of pilgrim lodging with a vegetarian dinner and one night on the overnight leg, breakfasts, all ground moves within and between the parts, luggage forwarding twice, and the garden, temple and workshop entries. Outside them: getting to Japan, which is your own booking; most lunches and dinners; and the single room difference, quoted by the operator.