I got off at the wrong end. The sign at the bottom of Magome points along the valley road, and I followed it two hundred metres before my watch showed the climb I had come for lying flat and useless behind me. The correction cost eleven minutes. I mention it because this walk is usually filed under gentle stroll, and gentle is not the same thing as signposted for someone starting in the wrong direction.
The numbers are small enough to keep in your head: about eight kilometres, two hundred metres of climbing to the pass, then a longer drop into the next post town. Walked without stopping it is a shade over two hours. I gave it most of an afternoon, which is the right pace, and also what happens when a route keeps producing reasons to stop.
The climb out of Magome
Magome sits at six hundred metres on the slope above the Kiso valley, and the trail leaves from the top of its cobbled main street rather than the bottom. The first twenty minutes are the steepest: paved, with old stone underfoot, and slippery in the specific way cobbles get when a night of rain has just finished. I was glad of closed shoes, which is not a sentence I expected to write about eight kilometres of walking.
About two and a half kilometres in, the farm road thins to a path and the climbing settles into switchbacks through cedar. Two junctions on that stretch point three ways at once. The wooden signs carry the old highway name and an altitude, and at both of them the answer is upward. Walkers coming down confirmed it each time, which is the navigation system on this route: a sign, then a person.
My watch logged two hundred and ten metres of ascent to the top against the one hundred and eighty the inn leaflet promised. Normally I would go looking for the missing thirty. The pass arrived first, at eight hundred and one metres, marked by a stone with a poem cut into it and a view back over the village I had left an hour earlier.
What the old road still does
The Nakasendo was one of the five highways laid out under the shogunate, five hundred and forty kilometres between the capital and Kyoto, with sixty-nine post towns spaced roughly a day of travel apart. This stretch survives as a footpath instead of being swallowed by the national road that runs the same valley. The surface was kept clear as a legal duty in those days, and now it is volunteer work, which reads in the detail: packed earth, original stone paving from the early sixteen hundreds through the shaded sections, and drainage that has obviously been cleared in the last week.
The spacing is what makes the walk work. A teahouse sits at the top of the climb, a waterfall takes a short detour off the main line, and the farm hamlets arrive in gaps rather than all at once. I ate a rice ball bought that morning at one of them, standing at a wooden counter while the owner rearranged pickles behind me. When she asked where I was going and I said Tsumago, she told me to take the upper path because the lower one was being repaired. It was.
The long way down
From the pass the route gives back about three hundred and fifty metres, most of it gradually. People recommend this direction, and having walked both, the arithmetic is simple: shorter uphill, longer downhill, less punishment on the knees. Cedar gives way to vegetable plots where the path runs between people's gardens, then a final stretch of fields before the roofs of Tsumago appear below.
Tsumago stands at four hundred and twenty metres and closes its main street to traffic, which is why it looks like a post town instead of a car park. The last bus for Nagiso leaves from the bottom of the village and runs about hourly through the afternoon, and the train from there joins the same line that serves Nakatsugawa on the other side. I had planned to walk the extra three kilometres to the station instead, until I checked the light and found I had less of it than the guidebook implied.
What I would change
Only the start time. I left Magome just after one o clock, which left plenty of daylight for eight kilometres and very little for stopping, and stopping is the part I remember. The walk is short enough to be folded into a day trip from Nagoya, so most people arrive in a group and move through at one speed.
The correction is to treat it as two hours of walking inside four hours of allowance. Start in Magome rather than ending there, keep the afternoon unbooked, and let the spacing of the stops set the pace. The highway was designed around the distance a traveller could cover between rests. Walking it that way costs nothing extra, and it turns a short hike into an afternoon that does not feel borrowed from somewhere else.