Kong not proxying correctly?

Currently running 0.9.9 and looking to use kong to bridge the transition between my api instances and k8/istio implementation. Before I get into canary-releasing and such I just need to make sure I can reach 1:1 on both sides.

My current configuration looks as follows:
user-stage:
upstream_url: “http://api-user.stage.domain.com
request_path: “/user/stage”

user-v2-test:
upstream_url: “http://test.k8s.domain.io/user/v2
request_path: “/test/user/v2”

preserve_host is false
and
strip_request_path is true for both

If I attempt to curl to https://kong.domain.com/user/stage/profile i get the expected profile information back.
If I attempt to curl to https://kong.domain.com/test/user/v2/profile I do not get anything back and it does not appear as if my request goes to the k8s cluster. However if I attempt my curl directly from the kong instance to the test cluster I get my expected profile back.

This seems like a misunderstanding on my part, but I’m unclear on what’s missing. I can see that my upstream url looks correct (when i strip the request_path). The only message I see in the access.log file is a GET /user/v2/profile so I can only assume it’s stripping out correctly, but does not appear to be going forward to the upstream server (I show no logs of any requests on the test.k8s.domain.io side).

Ideas?