Before you ride up to Mount Koya, the great mountain monastery of Shingon Buddhism, stop at its doorstep. Jison-in sits in the Kii river valley at Kudoyama, below the mountain, and it was founded by Kukai, the monk also known as Kobo Daishi, in the early ninth century as the administrative office and supply base for the new monastery above. Its most loved story concerns his mother. Women were barred from Koyasan for over a thousand years, so she lived here, and tradition says Kukai walked down nine times a month to visit her. That, the locals will tell you, is where the name Kudoyama, nine-times mountain, comes from.
Jison-in became known as the Koya of women, and it still feels gentle and domestic. Look for the small wooden plaques shaped like breasts hanging in the hall, offered by women praying for safe childbirth, good milk and, these days, recovery from illness. Just up the slope begins the Choishi-michi, the old pilgrim path to the summit, marked by stone posts set roughly every hundred metres all the way up. Walking pilgrims still use it, and it is a beautiful forest trail if you have the time and the boots.
Kudoyama is also persimmon country. In autumn the terraced orchards around the valley turn orange with fruit, and the local dried persimmons are worth buying for the road.
On the bike, the climb to Koyasan is the main event: a narrow mountain road with switchbacks through cedar and cypress, tight hairpins, damp shaded corners and the occasional tour bus coming down in the middle of the lane. Ride it in the morning before the coaches, or in the late afternoon when the light slants through the trees and the mountain town above is settling into evening prayers. Remember that Japan drives on the left, that speed limits are low and enforced, and that mountain roads can close after heavy rain or in winter snow.
Hashimoto, a city of over fifty thousand a few kilometres west, is the place for fuel, convenience stores and a proper meal; the small towns nearer the temple have less. Fill the tank before you climb, take a cold drink from a vending machine and give the old temple its due before the mountain.