Yep, we aren’t alone! We are always asking people to come travel with us, and Meg’s cousin Haley was able to meet up and see Kyoto with us. Haley had done some study abroad here 20 years ago, so she was able to show us some of her favorite places, while she took a trip down memory lane. Haley gave us the energy boost we needed as we are nearing the end of our 5 month trip. Meg and Haley spent 4 days chattering and laughing away while we saw a lot of the Kyoto famous temples and gardens and had some great meals together.
Our first day started with our usual “free” walking tour. We met our tour guide Kazu and he took us through the temples closest to us and then through the Geisha neighborhood of Gion. Meg and I had just seen a Geisha neighborhood in Kanazawa but Kazu explained more about the Geisha culture and how it is still alive in Kyoto. The temples were amazing and we enjoyed wandering our way between temples, gardens and historic old streets.
Haley stayed in a Zen Buddhist temple when she studied here 20 years ago. We we able to return to that Temple Complex (Myoshin-Ji) to see a still active monastery without the huge crowds of the more famous temples in the city. We wandered around the temples and saw the building that Haley stayed in when she was in college. We also enjoyed the solitude of the lovely garden within the complex. She also took us to a local ramen restaurant where we able to eat ramen with the locals. Kyoto is filled with tourists so many of the restaurants are unsurprisingly geared to tourists. It was nice to find a real ramen spot in a local neighborhood that hasn’t been changed by tourism.
I was interested in seeing the famous Fushimi Inari Taisha Shinto shrine. It consists of thousands of Shinto Tori gates that follow a trail up to Mt. Inari. Everyone told me that I needed to get there early to avoid the crowds so I got up my myself one morning and made it to the temple at 5:30am. I hiked through a lot of the orange Tori gates to get to the summit. The weather wasn’t super clear so I didn’t get great views but I enjoyed the trail and realized how out of shape I have gotten. There were several little temples on the way to break up the monotony of hiking in orange gates. It is always fun to find a hike out in nature in a big city. I am very glad that I made it up so early because it was starting to get pretty busy when I left the area around 7:30am and took the train back to find the ladies.
We spent a lot of time seeing the famous gardens and historic old buildings around Kyoto. We have a couple of Japanese gardens in Seattle that we visit back often when we are home. Those “American” Japanese gardens seem to have a lot more variety and quantity of plants in them. The gardens in Japan are much simpler but they are just very very old. These gardens have been here for hundreds of years so sometimes it feels like they were naturally made. The water features feel like it is a real forest stream or lake. In many of the gardens, they were very busy so it didn’t feel super peaceful but it was still fun to wander through and take a bunch of pictures.
We read a lot about how overcrowded Japan is for visitors. We timed our visit to avoid Japan’s “Golden Week” of school vacations and we also missed the cherry blossom season. We still ran into crowds in the train stations, subways, buses and in the narrow streets in some of the tourist districts. We didn’t have any “crush” loads on transportation but it wasn’t always comfortable. But even in big crowded cities, there are always places to get away from everywhere. There are temples, gardens, and local neighborhoods without tourists. We were easily able to find small alleys for out of the way dining and not wait in huge lines of foreigners. Japan has some great cities that everyone should eventually visit but now that we have seen them, we will probably seek out smaller towns for our next visit. We like Japan, but we really like the parts of Japan without the crowds.
We have been doing a good job of trying all types of Japanese food and many different eating experiences. It continued here in Kyoto with Haley with us. We had a really fun time at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant (Sushiro) that had an enormous interactive TV to order the cheap but pretty good sushi. We went to a gyoza restaurant, a ramen restaurant, a Japanese katsu curry restaurant, and an izakaya that had a terrible phone ordering system that should have made us very angry but mostly just made us laugh a lot. We have still not ran out of different types of Japanese food.
Kyoto was really fun and it was also really fun hanging out in Japan with Haley. Traveling excitement seems to multiply when you have more people. And Haley is a great traveling partner. Traveling in Japan can be a bit stressful but it didn’t seem that way when we were with Haley. Unfortunately, we did say goodbye to Haley as she took off to go see some mountain hot springs in Hakone. We are heading the other way and have booked 4 nights in Hiroshima. Our Japan trip is almost over, but there is still a bit more to experience!