Two days before leaving Portland my
fight schedule changed. This left me with an hour and 20 minutes to
clear customs/immigration, get my Japan Rail pass, and catch the last
train to Kyoto. Kim was to land earlier than me and we were to meet
at the JR exchange office. With the new time constraints there was a
strong chance we would be spending the night in Tokyo. My flight was
uneventful but these are the times when I prefer uneventful.
I was fortunate enough to be in the
front end of the plane which allowed me to clear both customs and
immigration in only 30 minutes. Kim had already obtained a spot in
the rail pass line saving us some much needed time. With all of these
factors we were able to catch the last train with a few minutes to
spare.
Groggy and disoriented we stepped off
the train and into Kyoto station. Our hotel had step by step
directions with photos which made it easy to find. We climbed up to
our room and retired for the night in our bed cave.
The next day we ventured over to
Kiyomizu Temple. In addition to the collection of beautiful buildings
the top features a nice view of Kyoto.
At the main temple we received fortunes
and tied them to the temples fortune rack so that they would come
true. As I can no longer read most Kanji we had no idea our fortunes
were, but we posted them anyway. Fingers crossed.
After the climb we decided to try the
local fare. We went with the crepe with
hot dog, pizza sauce, and cheese. You could really taste the Asian
influence in this dish.
(Note, you may recognize this photo. I took one from the same shop on my last trip to Japan)
Our next stop was the geisha district
to see if we could find a genuine geisha. This is about the best we
came up with (and no, these women are not geisha).
We ended our day wondering around a
local market looking at the various goods.
The next morning we hopped on our bikes
and headed to Fushimi Inari Shrine. This shrine is located on a
mountain and is filled with thousands of orange gates and fox
statues. There are also a number of people living on the mountain
that operate various shops.
We hiked all the way to the top and
were greeted with a light dusting of snow.
After visiting the temple at the
highest point we made our way back down the mountain. At the bottom
there were all sorts of street food options to choose from. We went
for the roasted quail on a stick. They were nice enough to stick the skewer through his eye socket.
We got back on our bikes and made our
way to the other side of town to visit the famous Golden Pavilion of
Kyoto. It was still daylight so the views were quite nice.
It was quite crowded but we managed to
get some good shots. We had been hiking and biking all day so we
decided to head back to the hostel. On the way back we decided to
stop at the Kyoto palace. We knew it was closed but we didn’t know
how closed it really was. It turned out you could not even see inside
from outside of the gate. We were super excited to pass by all of the
closed gates.
We headed back to the hostel quite
exhausted. By the end of the day we had biked through a large portion
of Kyoto. All in all we peddled around 20 km. With that our time in
Kyoto has come to an end. We will be taking a train to Osaka later
tonight, until then.
