So, Nic was here. We travelled around a lot and there’s really far too much to type down. Our big trips were to Kyoto and Tokyo so I’m going to make a post of each. I’m also not going to post loads and loads of pictures, because that’s kinda silly. I’m sure I’ll post the odd pic from the trip now and then, all at once is a bit much.
This is Kyoto.
We took the shinkansen to Kyoto, changing, of course, in Tokyo. We took a ‘Nozomi’, which is the fastest shinkansen train, on the Tokyo-Kyoto leg. We passed Fuji-san though it was too cloudy to see much more than the foothills. That was a shame, it would have been a beautiful sight on a clear day.
Kyoto station is a place worth visiting in itself, it’s a 10 year-old building with incredible architecture. We spent quite a while looking around it. It also has a ’sky garden’ with views over the city. We chilled out, took some photos and then headed off to the hotel.
We had 4 days in Kyoto. It’s filled with temples and gardens and shrines and palaces and castles. We saw an incredible amount of it all, though not everything we wanted to. I’ll mention the highlights of the 4 days.
The first temple we saw was Sanjusangendo. The building was quite impressive, a massively long wooden thatched temple. But inside was a little more incredible. It’s packed to the rafters with 1000 gold plated statues and another 11ft high one. And there are more guardian statues, which seemed very angry about the whole deal.
Next was Kiyomizu-dera. It’s been nominated for one of the new 7 wonders of the world. Yeah, amazing. It was really busy as we were there just after new year. We took our time and took the whole place in. I’d really love to see this place in autumn or spring.
Then to Kodai-ji. Doesn’t appear to be much info online. A temple with a beautiful garden. I’m told it’s lit up at night, though we saw it during the day.
Chion-in is massive. Massive gate. Massive hall. Massive bell. There’s also a park next to it that we say a mime artist perform in. There were a lot of festival stalls there too, for new year I think. Festival food is always fun.
We saw a little bit of Heian Jingu, though we didn’t go in.
It’s the east side of the city that’s most popular, where you find little shrines half a block down from massive temples and are continually stumbling across the most incredible sights. Everything I’ve described up to this point is located on that east side, and I think these are the major sights we saw while over there.
There are also two art galleries just down the street from Heian Jingu, the National Museum of Modern Art and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. The modern art museum was closed when we went. We took a look around an exhibition at the municipal museum instead. The exhibition was very varied, I think the theme was simply Japanese artists so there was a huge variation in styles and periods. It was very distinctive.
Because we were visiting just after new year we found a lot of things closed, which was quite frustrating.
On the second day we visited Nijo-jo. It’s an impressive fort, though never attacked, it was the symbolic residence of the shogunate designed as a status symbol of the shogun’s power. Walked around the gardens and the walls. We couldn’t go into the residence itself due to the everything-being-closed thing.
We also visited the Imperial Palace and took a tour. We had to jump through a couple of hoops to get on the tour, but we did in the end. Definately worth a little hassle to see, though not as spectacular as some of the temples we saw.
On our last day we saw to huge temples in the middle of the city, Higashi Honganji (West Honganji and East Honganji). One was set up in order to counter the increasing influence of the other. Both were under renovation when we visited, so the impact was kinda lost for us. Particularly with Higashi, it boasts the largest wooden structure in the world which was entirely covered up by a temporary building while renovations were carried out. Which was annoying.
We took the shink home in the afternoon. It was cloudy so again we didn’t see the whole of Fuji, though Nic did get a good photo of a rainbow in front of it. Much crashing out ensued after 4 days of lots of walking.
At points Kyoto really is a fairytale city, and there’s so much worth seeing. We spent 4 days there and even then didn’t see everything we wanted to. Having said that, we did manage to fit some hot-chocolate chasing, handbag shopping and fish + chips eating in between all the temple, palace and museum visiting.
We had a beautiful time. Mr Donut enjoyed our visit too.
