It dawns on me that the journey to the west took 5,040 days exactly, right, and while the book goes from tribulation to tribulation, there were still only 81 of those. And they were missing one when they got there. And some of the tribulations Tripitaka went through happened before the journey even started.
So, even being generous and saying that most of the tribulations that occurred during the actual journey could be said to have taken a few days to handle each, that's still only about 10% of the journey. A tribulation was anything that happened that put Tripitaka in danger or presented any sort of obstacle to him. Anything even remotely exciting would have fallen into that ~10%, and nothing else could have happened, because otherwise they wouldn't have gotten west one moderate inconvenience and/or major trauma short of the prize. (I mean, unless the thing that happened managed to not involve Tripitaka at all in any way, but that's very hard to do when you are all attached at the hip.)
Holy cow they really were just walking. ALL THAT TIME. No wonder Zhu Bajie was stirring the pot at any given opportunity. It was literally the only thing to do.
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