Kyoto

We travelled to Kyoto on Wednesday by shinkansen (bullet train). We found our hostel finally, which seemed like a very long walk in the heat with our backpacks (it’s been 33-34 degrees here every day! At least it’s been sunny and dry most of the time though, so it makes it great for sightseeing.) We then set out to explore the downtown area where we saw a couple of temples and the massive imperial palace park, which is lovely with many walking paths and a nice pond with carp swimming around. We then checked out the Gion district, where there are still traditional tea houses that real geishas still entertain in. We did actually see two geishas that night passing by, so that was neat.

The next day we decided to give our tired feet a break and to get around by bike instead to explore the regions of Kyoto that are further away from downtown that are much more scenic and ancient. We had a fantastic day seeing many beautiful gardens and temples. The highlight was seeing a temple called Ginkaku-Ji, which has the most delightful Japanese garden filled with delicate Japanese maples, bamboo groves and many different types of moss. There were also beautiful ponds and waterfalls as well, so we spent quite a bit of time at this garden in particular admiring it all and taking lots of pictures. Afterwards we biked back downtown and checked out the Kyoto station, which is an enormous and very interesting modern building. It takes several escalators to get to the very top where there is a garden and look-out point where we saw the sunset. There are several restaurants at the top, so we tried out a soup place where we had ramen noodles, which were very good.

Friday we took the train out to a different district of Kyoto called Arashiyama. This is another very scenic area with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. We started out by doing a nice walk along the river and we were trying to find this monkey park that we heard about from another traveler we met at our hostel. We got sort of disoriented and lost, but we finally figured out how to get there, so after some lunch we started the hike up one of the mountains to get to the monkey park. It was well worth the trip to get there once we did, because it was so much fun seeing the monkeys! This park has about 150 monkeys that are free to roam in the wild, but they chose to stay in that area since they are well fed. We got to feed them some fruit from inside a little enclosed area, which was really fun.

Today was an exciting day! We had read about a festival that is going on this weekend in Osaka called the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri, so we wanted to check it out. It took us about five different trains to get there so we got a thorough tour of Osaka by train, but we finally arrived, and we were so glad that we got to experience this! (I have not uploaded the photos yet, but I'll include some in the next post!) It was the craziest festival either of us had ever seen! In this festival they have big floats (danjiri) that weigh over 3000 kg, that are pulled by hundreds of people using ropes. When they come to a corner in the road they speed up and start running to turn the corner as fast as they can, and meanwhile there is a man on the top of the float that is dancing and jumping around as they turn the corner, so he has to have amazing balance! The crowds attending this was unbelievable as well, it’s sort of overwhelming to be amongst so many people. We left as the festival was still just ramping up and getting crazier it seems, which was good, because already the train on the way back was super packed…I have never been in such a busy train before, where personal space just does not exist. With each stop I thought, there’s no way to fit any more people in here, but somehow they managed to squeeze in more and more! We then made our way to Himeji castle which was built in 1580, and was very interesting to visit.

We miss you all and hope you are all keeping well. We really appreciate your e-mails, it is so nice to hear how you are all doing!