10/9 - Day 5

Friday, October 9

Today was our second full day in Kyoto. On this day, we had the same guide plus a driver.

The car he drove was similar to the car we got picked up in at the Tokyo airport. It seems to be a brand and model that is widely used for commercial livery.


Our first stop was the Golden Temple. 


This is a picture of the back of the grounds with the temple to the left and hills to the right.


Our next stop was the bamboo forest. Like all the stops, the driver had negotiate narrow alleyways and pedestrians. It was really nice to have a driver. 


Along this path, we passed what our guide said was a wedding party. Good luck trying to get nice pictures without having to photoshop dozens of people out of the picture.


This might have been a nice spot if not for these guys getting in the way.

We drove a touristy area and looked for lunch. We settled on a hole-in-the-wall by the train station (important because they didn't have a bathroom but the train station did). I ordered a meal instead of a single dish to try out some things I was not familiar with.


It reminded me of a bento box.

Since this area was for tourists, there were a bunch of guys for hire who pulled rickshaws. They looked like lightweight, high-end carriages. Still, these guys were young and looked like they were in pretty good shape. They originally caught my eye because they were wearing short shorts. Amanda said they were not individual entrepreneurs, but worked for a company. So the short shorts were part of the uniform. 


We walked across a stone bridge called Half Moon. Looking at it was more interesting than being on it.


Our last stop was the Fushimi-Inari Taisa shrine. This was not on our itinerary, but it was on a list of top attractions so we asked our guide to squeeze it in.

Each of the lanterns on this walkway represent a donation by a corporation or wealthy individual. The same is true for each of the arches on the rest of the property.


There are 1000 of these arches leading up and down the hill. Amanda said that it would take two hours to walk the entire property. We decided to take an abbreviated tour.



We got dropped off around 2:00. It was early, but that gave us a chance to re-pack for tomorrow.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

before the trip began

Image
Note: I usually write a post every day but only send out the link to the first post. If you want to see subsequent posts, you need to fool around a little with the website. One way to do it is to change the URL in the address bar to the next day (e.g., "Day 2"). Another way to do it is to use the search function (use the magnifying glass). Or you can go to the archive and choose September 2026 or October 2026 and go from there. You may see a link that says "More Posts" at the bottom of the page. That will show you more posts too. Good luck and thanks for reading!  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since 2012, Mike Reagan and I have planned and gone on bike trips over the summer, usually to European destinations. Others who have joined us have been Marty Canavan, Vince Giardina, and Stu Koman. Walter Putter has been a regular for the past five or more years, and we have redu...
Read more

10/14 - Day 10

Image
 October 14, 2026 The day started with rain. Our cute little hotel prepared breakfast for us and left it in the fridge. There wasn't much for a picture after we attacked it. Since it was raining, Romain took us to a knife factory. There was a museum attached to the factory discussing the history of knives. Here's the factory. It's a curious building, apparently built explicitly for the factory. We called it a grain silo. Here's the gift shop. There were a pair of serious bikepackers at the gift shop. Turns out they were French so Romain had a good time connecting with them. They biked from Europe across Asia. The factory was fun. We walked above the workers on a catwalk and watched them turn slabs of steel into knife blades. There was no one working at this station, probably a furnace. Most of the workers seemed like kids (maybe 20-somethings). Romain thought they might train here and then go off and start their own shops. In the gift shop building was this creative dis...
Read more

10/6 - Day 2

Image
 Tuesday, 10/6 We spend most of today in the air in a little aluminum cylinder. We were supposed to leave at 1:45 but problems with one of the onboard computers caused a two-hour delay. During that time we were allowed to pace the aisles and get to know our neighbors. I slept. It became Tuesday when we crossed the international date line. The flight was long but not difficult except for about a half hour of turbulence over Japan. We jumped through a number of hoops at the Tokyo airport and we were met by our driver. Unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of him with a sign that read "Jeffrey Chin - 3 guests". Who knows when that will happen again? The driver didn't speak much English, so we chatted with ourselves and watched the city roll by. Because of the delay, we arrived after 6:00pm instead of 4:00 and it was already dark. We'll have a little time to see the city in daylight tomorrow when we head to the train station. Our travel a...
Read more