West Kyoto - more temples and shrines

People who know us know that we like to pack our travel schedule to the limit. Although a mindful day-to-day planning was made, we were anticipating a possible issue for the future.

The day after tomorrow, we'll leave Kyoto and travel to the city of Hiroshima. And because our time there is also limited, we planned to visit part of Hiroshima already on that same day. This is where the problem arises: there's also one key highlight in Kyoto that's a bit out of the area where we're headed today. Adding it to the planning for the day after tomorrow would complicate things and endanger our plans in Hiroshima, so we decide to add it to the list for today. After all, we're on bike, we're agile, we're young and... Okay, let me stop there.

We have breakfast at the earliest time and take our bikes from the storage area. It's a rather long bike trip to the first (newly added) item on our list today: Kinkakuji, also known as the golden pavilion.

Side note about biking in Kyoto: remember how impressed we were in Tokyo about the discipline? It seems like this doesn't carry all the way through to biking. We plan our biking trips along major roads because those roads tend to have a separate bicycle lane. Otherwise, you should be biking on the road with the cars, but there's often not that much place and most people actually bike on the pedestrian sidewalk. Despite it being prohibited and often severely hampering you from advancing. There's also no such thing as keep left. As a cyclist, you just have to circumnavigate all the pedestrians.

We arrive at the famous landmark only 15-30 minutes after opening time and the crowd is still okay. The pavilion itself is indeed quite astonishing: standing on the side of a pond in its shiny golden color. The temple used to be a residence for a shogun but was later re-instated as a Zen temple.

As we walk around the grounds and take pictures of the building, we're happy that we didn't skip this place. Not too much later, we arrive back at our bicycle parking and are ready to continue our trip to the western part of the city. We decide to start in the northwest at the highest point, and continue downhill to end the day, rather than to go in the opposite direction. Our biking route takes us via some of the outskirts of the city and it's a nice change to see larger lakes, fields and farmers.

Some up- and downhills later, we arrive at Gioji temple. It's not the highest or most northern temple on the planning, but due to a slight navigational error from my side and a more than welcome break from the cycling uphill, we decide to start exploring here.

Gioji is tiny, calm and has almost no tourists at this time of day. The temple is surrounded by trees providing a lot of shade and an ideal place for moss to grow. No surprise that this Zen temple stands out for the different types of mosses and tranquility.

We hop back on our bikes and let gravity bring us to the slightly lower located temple of Nisonin.

These grounds are bigger than the tiny Gioji and have a beautiful central lane that leads up to the building. We imagine that it must be marvelous in autumn with all the maple trees turning orange and red. The temple itself is also in a Zen-style theme with nicely raked pebbles and nature as the main facilitator of the area. We enjoy the quietness and serenity of the place where people take great care in the preservation of all the flora. Imagine walking in a park where all the trees are meticulously maintained, there's no twig or leaf among the pebbles and not a single piece of litter around. Those elements by themselves are already impressive, let alone the location and architecture of the place.

When we exit the temple, we discover a sign that indicates "bike parking lot" in Japanese. Our bikes were in the shade of a tree just across the road. Good thing it's calm in this area of town and without Google Translate we had no way of knowing what was written on the sign. English is not always that well established in Japan.

After a sip of water from our bottles, we continue back uphill to go and explore the final two temples. The last part is very steeply uphill, but we made it! Workout for the day: checked!

Our guidebook referred to the next temple as undiscovered by tourism. In the sense that we don't really know where to park our bikes, yes. There were an equal number of tourists as in Nisonin and Gioji here, so I wouldn't really go with undiscovered. Nevertheless, it didn't feel crowded at all.

This small temple is known for a very special characteristic: 1200 tiny stone statues are placed around the temple. Some of them almost covered entirely in moss. It's a special sight and makes beautiful pictures.

Some time later, we bike back downhill through a tiny street that remained fixed in time. The houses on the side of the road, the road itself seem to come straight from the Meiji-era. As we park the bikes at Adashino Nenbutsuji temple, an old man approaches us and ask in broken English where we're from. He's happy to see foreigners and hand us a self drawn map of the area. He points out all the different temples that we've already visited or still have to visit on our way down. How nice!

Adashino Nenbutsuji is located in a more open space than the other temples. A monk once started by placing a little statue for each of the deceased. Now the sacred ground counts over 100 statues. Maybe the tradition of placing little statues started here?

Because of the open space, most of the statues are not covered with moss. It feels more like a sanctuary or graveyard compared to Otagi.

In the back of the temple, there's a little bamboo forest. There's only a small path in between the huge bamboo trees. Don't be fooled, this is the place where we managed to take our most beautiful bamboo pictures. So can definitely recommend this place!

It's already 1h30PM when we exit the temple and decide that it's about time to have lunch. Having finished all the temples on our list, we bike downhill to the river and connection with Kyoto city. Soon after, we locate a Seven Eleven store where we can enjoy a well deserved bento-box.

Having regained some energy, we go search for the famous bamboo grove forest that is located in this part of the city. We have to look a few times on Google Maps in order to find where the famous stretch of bamboo forest is exactly. We bike to the area and are quickly overwhelmed by the number of tourists. Surrounded by tourists, we can only advance on foot and once we've cleared the crowd, we head back for another loop to park our bikes somewhere. It's not easy to find a parking spot in this area as there's no designated parking area for bikes. Finally, we find a parking spot near a playground for kids not too far away from the touristic walk.

With the cameras at hand, we continue for a proper look of the area.

The entire area is only a few streets big and packed with people. The bamboo trees are not always as thick or dense as in other places we've seen them. In the main street, it's almost impossible to take a good overview picture. Happy that we got already some pictures before coming here, we follow the crowd and just enjoy being in the moment.

At the end of the trail, we enter a nearby park to grab some air. There's a viewpoint overlooking the river below and we take a little rest on a bench. Time to check what's still on our list, and to do a time-check as we have to hand in our bikes no later than 6PM this evening.

After our short break, we continue to stroll a bit through the park and head back to the parking area to pick up our bikes. We've figured out a route that brings us back to central Kyoto but also takes us along the river for a long while.

It's around 4PM as we leave the Western district over the togetsukyo bridge. A large wooden bridge that is also a famous landmark in the area and a well-loved place during blossom season to admire the beautiful trees near the riverbed. As we take distance from the city we admire the beauty of this city. Kyoto is located in a valley, surrounded by hills from all but one side. In the city center, it's hard to picture this, but here in the countryside you can clearly see the outline of the city and its surroundings.

As we're re-entering the city, we're also feeling more and more confident to cycle on the road instead of the pedestrian sidewalk. In some streets it's way faster to cycle in a sort of bus lane. In narrower streets we still switch to the sidewalk but overall, we're making swift progress.

It's around 5h45PM when we arrive at the store to hand-in our bikes. It was nice to have a different method of transport for the last couple of days. I wouldn't compare Kyoto to Amsterdam or Copenhagen as a biking city... but it got us everywhere we wanted in a decent amount of time.

Tonight, we plan on having dinner not far from our hotel. In one of the streets cornering our hotel, we saw a nice-looking little restaurant. We enter the place but unfortunately, everything is fully booked for tonight unless we don't mind eating at the standing table. Just next to the street window, there's a large table without chairs. Apparently, that's how they handle non-reservations: you can have dinner but standing so you don't take too much time. Although our feet are a bit sorrow, we don't mind standing up.

From what we can understand from the Google translated menu, it's a sort of tapas style restaurant. Although we're not really sure how big the portions will be. Soon after, another Japanese couple joins us at the standing table. They are so kind to translate our order and questions to the waiter. The food is tasty, but we feel kind of "small" in the shadow of the real Japanese people next to us. We're still hesitant about how to and when to eat certain things. They - obviously - know what they're doing.

After dinner, we're hesitant about going back to Fushimi Inari to see the torii gates at night. The site is open 24/7 and I imagined it must make great pictures at night too. The weather hasn't been kind to us in the evenings with some rain yesterday. Tonight looks rather okay-ish, and tomorrow is for sure rainy. Because it's now or never, we decide to grab that last bit of energy and head to the subway to go back to orange gates.

The subway and train take us in about half an hour to the site. It's now 8h50PM and armed with camera and tripod we hope to make some nice shots. One thing is immediately clear: the crowd is gone, and we almost have to the place to ourselves. Maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but in any case, it's easier to take pictures without other tourists in it.

To my surprise, the gates are not as well lit as I'd have imagined. Sometimes it's not easy to take pictures due to the different light sources and lanterns quickly over- or underexposing the shots. We play around a bit with poses, angles, go back and forth a few times. Occasionally, we have to jump away from big spiders that are crawling in the woods and on the pillars. At around 10PM we're surprised by a few drops of rain. We start packing the tripod and cameras, but by the time we manage to take it apart or take out our jackets, we're soaked by a downpour. That clearly states the end of the photo session. Time to get back to the train station and go to bed!もっと詳しく