Kyoto

So I’ll jump a head a little bit and talk about our day trip to Tokyo. From Hakuba we got a bullet train to Osaka where we were staying, but the following day we did a day trip to Kyoto while our JR pass was still valid.

First up, we went to Fushimi Inari-taisha a temple built for the Shintu god of rice, Inari. It started out a bit disappointing, as it was much like the other temples we had been to… but then it just kept going. There is a walk up the hill to a lookout and there are just gates the whole way, the amount of work that would have been involved is incredible. I really enjoyed it, although I think everyone else was put off by the fact that involved lots of walking up stairs and it really did seem endless.

By the time we had walked back to the bottom, everyone else was tired so it was decided we would go back to main train station to find lunch. I was happy to keep wandering until we found some lunch on the way to the next site but was outvoted. We had a really good lunch, but by the time we got to the next place I wanted to look at, Sanjūsangen-dō, it was closed. Likewise there was a few museums nearby but they were all closed for renovations as well. I guess winter is not a popular time for tourists so everything shuts early or is just closed in general.

It was a bit of a bummer and after that we got a train back to Osaka.