Kazu-san has been foraging the forests above Hongu for forty years, and he moves through undergrowth like it's a kitchen he's rearranged a thousand times — reaching past ferns without looking, coming back with a handful of wasabi greens or a knot of fresh nameko mushrooms clustered on a fallen cedar. I spent a weekend trying to keep pace with him along a spur of the Kumano Kodo, the network of pilgrimage trails that has connected Shinto and Buddhist sites across the Kii Peninsula for over a thousand years, and mostly failed, but ate extremely well in the attempt.

The peninsula sits south of Osaka, thick with cedar and cypress forest, and the pilgrimage routes wind between three grand shrines collectively known as Kumano Sanzan. Unlike Japan's more famous trails, these see relatively few foreign visitors, and the villages along the way — Hongu, Yunomine, Koguchi — still run on a rhythm built around onsen bathing and small-scale farming rather than tourism.

Yunomine claims to be Japan's oldest hot spring town, and its centerpiece is a public bath so small you queue for a fifteen-minute turn, plus a roadside pit called Tsuboyu where locals still boil eggs and sweet potatoes in the geothermal water on their way past. I did both. The egg came out with a faint sulfur tang that I liked more than I expected to.

Dinner each night was whatever Kazu-san had pulled from the forest that afternoon, prepared by his wife with a restraint that let the ingredients do all the talking: mushrooms simply grilled with salt, wasabi greens blanched and dressed in soy, river fish given nothing but time over charcoal. It was the least fussy, most deliberate food I've eaten in years, and I've thought about the mushrooms more than once since getting home.

The trail itself is steep in places but well-marked, threading through cedar so dense the light goes green, past centuries-old stone markers and the occasional weathered jizo statue draped in a red bib. Walking it after two days of Kazu-san's foraging lessons, I found myself checking the underbrush without meaning to, as if I'd absorbed some tiny fraction of his eye for it.

Getting there: Take the JR train to Kii-Tanabe, then a bus into the mountains; foraging tours are best arranged in advance through a local guide.

Best months: Late autumn for mushroom season, though the trail is walkable most of the year outside typhoon season.