Kyoto

Any first-time trip to Japan has to involve Kyoto, so we duly did that after Kanazawa. We arrived early evening and went for a walk around the Imperial Palace. These were nice, but the main sight was the incredible red sunset, that this photo barely does justice to:

next day was a marathon of temples. We started off in Southern Higashiymam, visiting kiyomizu-dera. This was definitely impressive, but both the temple and the run-up were really busy so it was difficult to appreciate fully (and to take a good photo). After that we walked through a geisha district, which was suitably picteresque, and visited a fewer smaller temples along the way. The next major temple was chion-in, which was large and wooden. We went for a nice walk up to Northern Higashiyama after that and made it to joshi-ji just before it closed. Most of the crowds had died down by this point, and we could enjoy the views in relative peace.

The second day we aimed to do a bit less walking, so we took a bus out to the bamboo forest on the west of the city. This was nice, but unfortunately it was extremely busy again so we didn’t linger for long. We instead paid to go into some nearby gardens developed by an old film star, which were more peaceful and had great views back across this city.

After the bamboo forest we took public transport down to fushimi inari taisha, which is famous having a lot of distinctive shinto gates. There were, indeed, a lot of gates. It started out busy, but the walk with all the gates was long and involved a reasonable amount of climbing, so it narrowed out eventually. Once it was quiet, it was really impressive, and this was probably my favourite part of Kyoto overall. I failed to take any good photos here, but I did get an unintentionally artsy one of Kate:

On our last day, we went up to kinkaku-ji, another famous Buddhist temple, this one made of gold. There were also a lot of schoolchildren.

We finished off our temples by going to two less popular ones near the station, which was a much calmer experience. We also wandered up to nishiki market then walked along the river.

We had to finish off our time in Kyoto with some last-minute replanning after typhoon hagibis meant that our trip the following day to the Kumano Kodo trail wouldn’t be possible.