Entries about kyoto

Today we followed the self guided unesco sites tour from the travel information, pretty sure we got full value of our all day bus passes. There were a couple of sites included that weren’t unesco & I think we missed one of those, so here they are

Nijo Castle (we feed the fish here....with food from the vending machine)

Kinkakuji

Ryoan-ji

Yasaka Shrine (stumbled across another wedding)

Kiyomizu Temple

Each site was beautiful & yet they were all different.

Starting to feel like I’m wearing out the soles of my socks removing my shoes to enter temples. Tip when travelling to Japan wear socks as clean as the temples look I keep seeing people with bare feet.

Still in Kyoto we decided to go explore Arashiyama with the bamboo Forrest high on our list. Armed with a walking map from the tourist information at the train station off we went.

Our first stop the Tenryu-Ji Temple as we had to pay we decided to just pay to see the garden as we had read it was good & we enjoyed strolling through the peacefulness & laughing at the toilet paper vending machine.

We were heading for another temple and found this little statue garden on the way (we skipped the other temple we had to pay to go in)

So next on the itinerary was the bamboo forest let’s just say I was a bit disappointed, I don’t know it wasn’t quite what I expected.

Turning back we headed to the bridge & the monkey park which was the best bit of the day minus the steep climb. You have to hike up the mountain which well having battled a cold last week & well coming from flat ground was a struggle but I did it. You get to the top and there’s MONKEYS!!! Even cute little baby monkeys, I wanted to take all the monkeys home, your meant to stay 3m away but it’s hard when they just stroll straight past you just about treading on your toe. The view over Kyoto was quite impressive too.

We stumbled across a kimono walk, which was just poles covered in material the look effective.

Now it’s been some 22,000+ steps kinda day, a little warm (like 30 degrees) so a bath was in order (our bath is like 4feet by 1 3/4 feet)

Yes that’s a tv in our bath, nothing much in English but still alright to channel surf while scrunched up in the bath it’s really deep & strangely comfortable)