Inari Woodcrafting Village and Temple

Today is our other tour guided day trip of our holiday, with us heading back out into the snowy mountains to go to three different villages: Inami, Gokayama and Shirakawa-Go! Our guide is an Aussie, and the only other person that's part of our tour is also an Aussie, with all of the east coast states represented, which we found pretty funny!

This is our first stop of the day, and already we know we are in for an absolute treat.

The scenery whilst driving is so gorgeous. It's very reminiscent of the farmlands of the eastern coast of Taiwan that had enormous Japanese influence due to the Japanese takeover of the country for a period of time. Except, this time, instead of being surrounded by green mountains, we are surrounded by snowy ones!

Inami Village itself is a gorgeous, remote village that specialises in woodcarving, and has the 5th and 6th largest temples in all of Japan. There wasn't another tourist in sight! We had the entire town to ourselves.

As part of the tour, we got to go into a woodcarving workshop to see a bunch of woodcarvings and the tools used. We then explored the temple grounds and various quarters (no pics allowed inside the temples but the inside was absolutely lovely and with a LOT of gold) before having free time to explore the village ourselves and do a fun little activity I will explain in the next post!Read more