Sightseeing in Kyoto

Hello again from Kyoto! I travelled 🧳 further to the south from Koriyama in northern Honshu to the Kansei region. In Tokyo, I had to switch from one Shinkansen (bullet train) 🚆 to another one and I had only 15 min time for it!!! This was quite tough since Tokyo station is pretty confusing with so many train platforms and people; it was close but I managed somehow to get to the train in time. 😊

Kyoto is one of the former capitals of Japan.
In fact, the places we call Kyoto, Nara and Tokyo today have alternated as capitals under different names throughout the history of Japan 🇯🇵 You can still feel Kyoto is an important place due to the elegance of the streets, the many well-maintained parks 🌳and rivers as well as the sheer number of sights and museums to visit.
It felt a little more expensive 🤑 than the other places I had visited so far though. I slept for two nights in the well-located The Millennials capsule hotel (https://www.german.hostelworld.com/hosteldetail…) in the city centre and paid 100,- EUR per night. Probably the most I have ever spent on a night in a hostel 😅 But the little cabins they had were really nice. The lobby and chillout area was also quite comfy. Part of it was reserved for remote work. So when I walked in, I felt as if I was visiting a WeWork. 😂 There was even a beer happy hour every evening. This is also where I met a few fellow travelers. We went for dinner in a tiny well-hidden dumpling 🥟 restaurant and had a few beers later on. The next morning we explored the city together. We covered a lot of ground that day. The first stop was Arashiyama Bamboo Forest - a spacious park abundant with high bamboo trees 🎋 that we and absurdly many other tourists crossed via some narrow paths. It didn’t matter that we went quite early there (at 8 am). It was packed anyways.
Then we visited the buddhist temple Tenryū-ji 🛐 that was founded in the 14th century; mainly in response to a memorial service for the deceased emperor of the Kenmu Restoration. That brief period was the last time when an emperor held power in Japan 🇯🇵 until the Meiji Restoration - in between the samurai ruled the country. The temple is a world heritage site nowadays but the Japanese style rooms inside of the temple were not so interesting since they were empty. However, the Japanese garden ⛲️ outside of it was really colorful and well-designed. I liked it a lot.
From Tenryū-ji temple, we crossed the Togetsukyo bridge to Iwatayama Monkey Park 🐒 and watched countless snow monkeys running around at the top of the hill.
After observing the monkeys for a while, we made our way back down again to walk along the very scenic trail beside the Katsura River. Our fourth destination that day was the buddhist Daihikaku Senkōji Temple on a close-by hill. Some sources say it has the best views of Kyoto.
This was already a lot of sightseeing for one day but we still had time ⏱️ for one more location. We fished our excursion that day with Kinkaku-ji - aka the golden temple and its easy to see why. The main characteristics of this buddhist temple are the lake surrounding it and the pavilion covered in gold. Both things make for nice and good photos. 📸 Needless to say that the place was very crowded but that is also the case with almost any other tourist attraction here in Japan. We took the bus back to our hostel and went for an early dinner (ramen again) and were back in our hotel right in time for the beer happy hour. 🍻

The next morning I got up really early (6am; no kidding) as I had planned with Caio and Anna-Maria (two other travelers) to beat the crowds and arrive early at Fushimi Inari - our first destination for the day. It certainly didn’t help that we confused the station and trains on our way to the sight. 🤦 We arrived at 8 am instead of 7.30 am (as initially planned) but there were already a lot of people. So, we walked together with the other tourists through the Torii Gates ⛩️ at Fushimi Inari. What makes this place special is the sheer amount of Torii Gates. According to official estimates there are currently around 10.000 gates installed on the way leading up to the summit of Mt. Inari. Each gate was either sponsored by a company or a private individual. After climbing a lot of stairs 😮‍💨 we arrived at the top where many shrines were waiting for us. The Torii Gates serve as guardians for Shinto shrines. Shinto is the indigenous religion here in Japan. Buddhism was only imported in the 6th century from China 🇨🇳 Interestingly, Buddhism and Shintoism can coexist quite well with one another ☯️ since one deals with the soul and afterlife while the other one revolves around kami - some supernatural entities - that can inhabit anything (including forces and entire landscape locations like mountains) in this world. Therefore, many Japanese practice both. 🧘‍♂️
After seeing the Torii Gates we parted ways since Caio still had to travel to Mt. Fuji and Anna-Maria had other plans for the day. I went on to see another popular Shinto shrine: Heian-jingū; which was built in the end of the 19th century to celebrate 🎊 the founding of the city Kyoto; then a good 1000 years ago.
Afterwards, I went to the imperial park and the imperial palace 🏯 Both were really nice and this was the first sight of that day that was calm and didn’t have many people. Admission was also free. Maybe I was simply lucky. 🍀 I spent more or less an hour strolling through the park and the palace before I headed back to my hostel.
I was traveling 🧳 further to Osaka in the evening and I had to pick up my stored luggage from there.Read more