Day 57: Kyoto Day 2

Emily
Dec 13, 2018
4 min read

Updated: Aug 4, 2019

Today's itinerary:

- Fushimi Inari-Taisha

- Tofukuji Temple

- Kyoto Tower

- Higashi Honganji Temple

I have slowly been sleeping in later and later each day that I've been here. Today I woke up after 10 and I was back in Kyoto around noon. I was super excited for my first stop because I had seen really beautiful pictures of it online!

Fushimi Inari-Taisha

Fushimi Inari is a shrine that has become famous for having paths lined with thousands bright orange torii gates. The shrine itself is dedicated to Inari who is the Shinto god of rice and it was moved to Kyoto in 794. There are lots of fox statues on the shrine grounds because foxes are thought to be Inari's messengers.

Inside the main gate's entrance was a long street lined with so many yummy looking food stalls.

I walked past several temples before I found the start of the trail.

The trail leads into a mountain and is a lot longer than I thought it would be. There were so many different paths completely covered by torii gates. The gates were both beautiful and cool! They were all in different shades depending on when they had last been repainted and there were some spots where the gates were so close together that I couldn't see outside. The gates also varied in size. There were some paths where the gates were huge and then some where they were small enough that I could've reached up and touched the top of them.

I walked for half an hour before I found a shrine area and little gift shop on the side of the mountain.

Pricing for the gates. The number in the second column is the price in yen (the little symbol to the right of the number means yen). 175,000 yen is more than $2000 canadian! So 5 gates alone cost over $2000 to build.

There was a map by the gift shop but it was all in Japanese and there were no distances so I didn't know how long it would take to get to the top.

I decided to find my way back down the mountain instead. The way down wasn't as exciting, although I did pass some shrines.

I bought a red bean bun from one of the stalls at the entrance and watched someone make these little ball things out of octopus.

Tofuku-ji Temple

It took me 20 minutes to walk between the two places.

When I arrived at Tofuku-ji it looked like there was some kind of market set up inside the gates. I didn't want to pay the admission fee for the market without knowing what it was for so I just wandered around the outer area. There were still lots of cool buildings to see! I typically don't pay admission fees to go into the temples here because I can still see so much of them without having to pay anything. I do pay the fee for some of the bigger and more famous temples or ones that have big gardens.

Kyoto Tower

My next stop was Kyoto Tower, which is an observation tower similar to the CN tower (but about 1/5 of the size). It took me 40 minutes to get from the temple to the tower, but I passed a really pretty water way and lots of cool buildings along the way. Each area in cities that are popular for tourists have 'local sightseeing map' signs or pictures built into the ground. It's really interesting to see a map of all the shrines, temples, and other spots in each area and I could totally spend a day just following the maps to find different sightseeing locations.

Higashi Honganji Temple

Higashi temple is less than 5 minutes from Kyoto tower so I decided to check it out. I was getting hungry at this point though so I thought I would look for a restaurant nearby first. I was so surprised to find that the majority of the restaurants didn't open until 5 pm. This area must have been more of a night life spot because I haven't experienced this in any other areas I have been to. There was a restaurant 20 minutes away that served omelettes so I decided to go to the temple and then eat after.

The temple was huge! There was a large wall that went all the way around the outside of it and took up an entire block. Inside the wall were several buildings but there was one huge temple in the middle. There must have been some event going on because there was singing coming from the temple and there were tents set up outside it.

I walked around briefly before exiting and heading towards the restaurant.

By the time I made it to the restaurant it was 3:30. The menu was mainly Western food and I hadn't had anything green in awhile so I decided to get a cobb salad. I pulled out my phone to play on it while waiting and then noticed that every table had a sign on it saying no phones allowed. What the heck was I supposed to do if I couldn't play on my phone (this crisis was probably why they have the sign...)? I ended up staring out the window and writing random things in my notebook to make it look like I could survive without my phone for 10 minutes. I did notice that some of the taxis had TVs in them, which was fancy.

When the salad finally arrived I was relieved that I didn't have to try to entertain myself for any longer. I think the no phone thing is great when you're eating with people or you have something more interesting than a road outside the restaurant, but these were just not the right condition for it. The salad was super yummy! There were bacon and eggs and avocado and all sorts of foods that I hadn't had in awhile on it which was a nice change.

Once I was done eating I went outside to figure out where I wanted to go next. I was pretty tired from all the walking I had been doing over the past few days and I wasn't really interested in seeing another temple. There was a train station about 20 minutes away so I chose to just head home and nap for a bit.

I relaxed in bed for several hours and then left at 8 to go to Dotonbori and grab dinner. I ended up back at the ramen place I really like (shocker).