Day 4 - Kyoto

I'll start this out by saying that we walked 38,000 steps in Kyoto.

On another note I've hit the allowed free storage limit for Wix and they want me to pay in order to upload any more photos. I would've considered it if it were like $3-5 a month but its $17 a month minimum which is outside of the budget for what is essentially a hobby blog. I'm considering how to move forward.

Anyway back to Kyoto, we got up around 5 and headed to the train station by about 6. The Shinkansen goes between Kyoto and Osaka in 15 minutes but costs significantly more money and doesn't run quite as often. Also the Shinkansen Station was closer than our Namba station so we just took a local train which took about 50 minutes to get to Kyoto.

The main reason we got up so early, other than having limited time in Kyoto was that the Fushimi Inari thousand gates are pretty famous for getting crazy crowded. Also it was hot and we wanted to attempt it when it was a bit cooler. We got there by like 7am and it was actually even before the street vendors were set up. The main area where you enter is a big shrine but then after that its the famous staircase up the mountain surrounded by like a thousand red gates all the way up. Its very beautiful and clearly famous for a reason. But its kind of narrow, only one lane (there is a loop towards the top but still too many people to move comfortably once it really picks up), and again you are climbing up a mountain, its just nicer to be cooler.

That being said, it was still hot and we still sweated like dogs the entire way up.

One thing I do wonder is why Japan doesn't charge a tourist fee for these kinds of things. I don't necessarily think it would even cheapen the experience but a shrine needs maintenance as much as anything else and especially one that gets millions of visitors a year. It wouldn't even have to be a big number, they could charge it just to tourists, like 100 yen a person (currently like 66 or 70 cents depending on the day) would be more than enough. And as a tourist, why shouldn't we be charged to enjoy these kinds of places?

I can't really say much other than we spent maybe 45 minutes walking up all the stairs and looking at the different shrines along the way. I suspect for someone religious and Japanese it must be a wild annoyance to have to pray or attempt to do anything surrounded by all these tourists. The one guy we did see praying tho had a little radio or speakers on him and anytime he wasn't praying was walking around blaring random music. That was honestly really annoying.

When we came down we made our way to the NW side of Kyoto to Arishiyama which is the area of Kyoto where that big bamboo road is. Its basically this grove of really tall quite large bamboo that lines this one road you can walk down. Its become a big enough tourist attraction that a shopping street has grown naturally around it and a few other touristy things. We stopped for lunch at a place we made a reservation on before the trip started with a river view and a very fancy spread. It was I think the most expensive meal we ate on the entire trip which was 9500 yen or $65 total.

Some part of me looks back and thinks that we probably should have had a splurge meal somewhere along the way. But I guess with the way the yen is currently is priced against the dollar that was a splurge meal. We had a couple of $100+ meals in Europe the last time we were there that didn't come close to the quality of this lunch. We had seats overlooking the river, shabu shabu, sushi, added the extra for wagyu beef, and several other small plates and everything was delicious. I do know that we mostly ate on the cheaper side on this trip, there is definitely very expensive and very high end food in Japan but with the difference of food quality from the US to Japan even the basics are just that much better and so good. Even the mcdonalds is better.

The one thing they did serve that I didn't like was these tiny whole squid things. I won't describe it in detail but basically they were just cooked, not cut up in any way, and you could tell exactly what was what as you chewed. I hated it, Sam loved it and I am okay with that. Sam's mantra I think is "if people eat it, I eat it" and I'm so happy that he gets just a bit more out of life and travel than I do for that fact lol. We can all live vicariously through him.

This is a link to where we had lunch: https://www.itsukichaya.com/

Anyway after lunch we walked through the bamboo road, which while cool, really truly is just a road lined with big bamboo and a ton of tourists. The one nice thing tho is that the road only takes maybe 10 -15 minutes to walk in its entirety and also is a bit wider so even tho there were a bunch of people by the time we got there, its really not too claustrophobic or packed. Like yes, you can tell you're in a crowd but you never have to be close enough to even threaten bumping elbows with anyone. Somewhere in the bamboo street is the entrance to the Okochi Sanso Garden, which while I'm in picture limbo you should google to get an idea of. It was one of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen in my entire life. Including that wild botanical garden Sam and I wandered into in Hawaii. That garden was lush and incredible but this garden was so beautiful it almost seemed other worldly. It makes me want to take another trip to Japan and just do a Japanese garden tour.

Anyway at that point we ended up just walking and walking and walking. It feels like a fever dream, who needs to walk that far? At 5pm we made it to a temple literally minutes too late to enter and I had wanted to see this one