KYOTO REVISITED
There is so much to do in Kyoto but time and the fragility
of our bodies meant some hard decisions in prioritizing sights. We tended to
our laundry early while finalizing our plans. In the morning we went to the
Fushimi Inari Temple complex. The temple is famous for its thousands of red
arches or torii gates all adorned in red lacquer with black inscriptions.
Crowds of people walk through the gates and up the hill to several other
shrines stopping every four feet to take another selfie. The incessant crowds
were too much for us and we took a detour up into the woods through bamboo
groves and cedar forests ecstatic to be in nature and finally relatively alone.
Our ambling took us to a couple of amazing off the beaten path temples. At
first they seemed to be a dilapidated repository for spare temple parts, but as
we explored further we found that each temple contained many other stone-carved
shrines. Frogs croaked and birds sang amid the sound of running water in a cool
cedar forest. We were at peace. Every day of our lives should be like this.
Later we ventured to the Arashiyama area known for its temples and for our
main destination - the Bamboo Grove. We
were pretty weary by this time and temple fatigue had firmly set in. All I
needed was a rest and some food and an Italian café fit the bill.
On the way back we stopped to view, and photograph Kyoto
Station’s well-known architectural glass and metal structure.
We returned to our hotel to rest and to sort through our
luggage as we had decided to send our suitcases on to our next destination
(Kanazawa) so that we did not have to carry a lot of luggage with us up into
the mountains of Koyasan. In Japan there is a great network of luggage delivery
services and hopefully this will work seamlessly.
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