Day 12 Japan - Kyoto part 2 - torii gates, temple and a market

03 September
Day 12 Japan

I had a pretty good day yesterday.  A nice mix of temples and not-temples and the party last night was fun.

Today's agenda is as follows:
 1. Fushimi Inari-taisha ... I.e. The torii gate temple
 2. A couple of other nearby temples
 3. Nishiki market
 4. Kyoto Machiya brewery
 5. Gion - walk through the geisha district

Fushimi Inari-taisha is probably the thing most people visualise when they think about Kyoto.  I know I did.  It's the shrine with the thousands of big torii gates.  Makes for some spectacular pictures which also means it's absolutely packed with tourists all the time.

I got started nice and early to try and beat a few of them.  Shockingly my tourist pass actually covered the trip to the shrine on the train.

It was pretty busy when I arrived (a full train load after all) but was nothing compared to later when I was finished.  You really only see images of the torii gates but there's a whole temple complex here before the walkway with the gates starts.  It's really quite an impressive complex but I just find the red and gold to be such a distasteful colour scheme.  It just sort of grates on me and I keep going back to "gaudy" as a word to describe it.  I don't dislike the red as much on the gates ... maybe because they are smaller and there is space to break it up but I really don't like it on the buildings.

Anyway - I proceeded through the complex and found the start of the walkway.  I hadn't really planned to walk the whole thing since, as Buddhists seem to love to do, they built it on a god damn mountain and exercise is my nemesis.  But I did want a few decent photos and since most tourists are lazy I just kept walking to try and outdistance them.

By the time I got to the point where I managed to get a few shots between groups I was halfway to the top so I figured I might as well keep going.  It was warm but nowhere near as bad as further south and there were plenty of places to stop if you needed it so overall it wasn't too bad.  I didn't even stop that many times!

Halfway up there were some signs saying that because this was a sacred mountain there would be no more toilet stops.  Apparently pooping is an insult to Buddha or something.  However - it appears that having shops and cafes all the way up the mountain to charge visitors ridiculous prices for food, drink and charms is not an insult.

I'm not entirely sure how a natural bodily function can be bad but rampant capitalism good but what do I know?

In the end it was a nice walk and the walkways with the torii gates are really beautiful and scenic to walk through.

By the time I got back down to the bottom the place was absolutely crawling with people.  This place is a great example of tourists vs visitors / travellers.  So many people dressed up in their best clothes with hair and makeup standing in front of the gates for 10 minutes trying to get the perfect selfie completely oblivious to the fact everyone else around them is waiting for them to get out of the way.  It's amazing how quickly the number of people in the walkway reduces once it starts to go uphill.

Anyhoo.  Finished there and I made for the Kenninji temple.  On the way it seems I accidentally walked through Gion which is one of the geisha districts.  Lots of traditional buildings and whatnot.  It wasn't anything special during the day but I'd be coming back there later tonight.

Kenninji turned out to be my favourite temple so far.  I just thought this place was absolutely beautiful and serene.  And again it's a building with the dark wood beams, sliding doors, zen garden etc...  There's a theme emerging here.

There were a couple of Korean tourists in their rental yukata doing geisha photo shoots here while I was walking around which while completely touristy did add a bit to the experience.  They also have this hall which has this really excellent cloud dragon painting on the ceiling.

I can't say how much I enjoyed this place so I'll just post some pictures.

I ended up spending more time here than expected and I didn't bother moving onto the next temple I had planned as I sort of wanted this to be the last one in Kyoto.  So I moved onto the Nishiki market.  It's basically just a big shopping mall but they've got one particular street with a bunch of food stalls (street food, pickled vegetables etc...) which was pretty interesting and fun to walk down.

Tons of other tourists here but I walked down, had some samples, bought a few things and mostly just enjoyed myself trying some different stuff.  Some of the pickled vegetables in particular were really tasty and I would love to see more of that in Australia.

After I'd eaten my fill I made my way towards the Kyoto Machiya Brewery.  It was about 15 minutes walk from the market.  It's a brewery with 2 local female Brewers that is an offshoot of a local sake brewery.  Apparently Kyoto is really good for sake brewing because there are a lot of wells for easy access to really good water.  In fact the sake brewery here used to brew all their sake from the well in the backyard.

It turns out this brewery was not in fact open on the day I went because they had not updated their opening hours on the Internet.  So I ended up at the sake brewery a couple of doors down which promised to have their beers available for tasting.  The sake brewery was now actually just a museum and tasting room.  Seems their operations had moved to a different part of the city to increase production.

Anyway.  Since I was there I paid the 300 yen to tour their "museum" which was just an old house with some brewery memorabilia.  Waste of money really but in the end I did get to do a tasting of some of their sake and the beer I originally came for.  Both the sake and beer were really tasty.  The beer was a couple of styles I'm not really familiar with (not sure if it was just the Japanese word for styles I'm used to or different styles of beer) but they used some local Japanese ingredients and I really enjoyed them.

I ended up buying a bottle of beer and a bottle of umeshu (plum wine) to take away.

I also ended up drinking both the beer and the plum wine that afternoon sitting in the hostel waiting for my laundry to finish.  Whoops.

After my laundry I went out and had a look at Gion at night.  Didn't see any geisha (just some tourists dressed up) but it was a nice area at night.  Old buildings, quiet back streets and you can just imagine some geisha flitting around the place going to their appointments in hidden restaurants behind sliding screen doors.

Had dinner. At a place near the hotel on the way back where I tried raw horse meat.  It was not very good as they had clearly just defrosted it when I ordered it (still slightly frozen) and it was a cheap cut.  Hopefully I'll try it again at a later date.

Finished the day trying to get some updates done for the blog and ended up chatting to an American guy who has been living in Japan for the last couple of months.  Nice guy (from Portland - nice place!) who unfortunately hadn't done any travel to the areas I'd be moving to from Kyoto.  Ah well.