Day 13 Japan
So today I'm off to a place called Koyasan. There is a huge number of temples here and it's a very popular pilgrimage site. There are a few pilgrimage routes around the place I believe and one of them visits something like 88 temples.
It's also one of the best places to do a temple stay but I simply wasn't organised enough to do it.
Koyasan is actually easier to get to from Osaka so I really should have done this before going to Kyoto but that's just one of the things of not planning in advance right ;]. Praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the JR pass. I've certainly abused that.
I believe my travel today looks like this:
1. train: Kyoto -> Osaka
2. train: Osaka -> Shin-Imamiya
3. train: Shin-Imamiya -> Guk-something
4. cablecar: Guk-something -> Koyasan
5. bus: Koyasan -> Hostel
I think my first train was at 8am and I arrived about 1.30pm so all up it's 5-6 hours of travel. Given the awesomeness of Japanese trains and the amazing scenery it certainly didn't feel that long.
Breakfast ended up being coffee from a vending machine with about 15 seconds to spare between train changes.
I was going to have a little rant about the JR Pass not covering step 3-4 above but given the nature of Koyasan I'm kind of glad it's not covered. Having that barrier of an extra $50 or whatever it was to get there stops a lot of the wrong kind of tourist making the trip and ruining the place.
There were a bunch of other tourists (both Japanese and not) on the train to Koyasan but it wasn't busy. The perks of off-season.
I was staying in a capsule hostel for the night here. Really small facility with maybe 15 beds but it was really nice and the capsule I got was much bigger than I expected.
There was a South American dude working there who gave me the lowdown on the what-where-when of Koyasan. There were a few things I was interested in so that provided a bit of a framework for my itinerary.
The first place I was going to stop was a vegetarian restaurant in town that serves food in the same style as the temples. Very simple hearty vegetarian food which I was interested in trying. Bastard place closed an hour earlier than the guy said it would so I ended up at a little Japanese place across the road and had noodles or something for brunch.
This place really is temple heaven for people interested in that. They are all beautiful, very densely packed together and some of them are absolutely huge. I don't know the names of any of them but it was not very busy so I got a bunch of decent photos.
One of the temples I visited was the head temple of this particular sect of Buddhism around the world. It was a magnificent building and a very peaceful place. The Buddhists really are very nice people. In one room which I assume was the lecture hall they were handing out tea and biscuits to everyone so they could chill out on the floor have a rest.
I spent the afternoon wandering around the temples and the town looking at places that were interesting and playing a bit of ingress.
One of the other major attractions here is a giant graveyard in the forest. There are something like 200,000 gravestones here and a big temple at the end of it. The graveyard kind of reminded me of the redwood forests in California. Huge trees that had clearly been there for a very long time. Not as big as the redwoods but both areas give me a feeling of age and long slow march of time.
It was really fun wandering through the graveyard. There are some really beautiful and impressive gravestones / tombs both old and new. A lot of people have clearly spent a lot of money here. There are also plenty of side trails to walk down that lead to little grottos or clearings with their own sets of gravestones. Great area to explore.
The temple at the end was closing at 6pm or something so I made my way down there. This temple has thousands of lanterns hanging around the place for some reason. I'm not sure why but they were very beautiful and gave the temple a very warm feel. Apparently 2 of the lanterns have been continuously burning for over 1000 years. That's dedication considering how often temples get burnt down here.
The other thing about this place is the monks believe there is some dude still alive in the back of the temple who has been meditating there for 1000 years. Part of the temple life is that they still bring him meals every day. No mention of emptying the slop bucket so I assume he doesn't eat the meals.
There's not a lot open for dinner in this town but conveniently there were 2 restaurants within a 5 minute walk of the hostel that were in fact open. The more interesting of the 2 was full so I ended up at the tonkotsu place. I believe tonkotsu is basically crumbed meat served with rice and salad. It's generally not my first choice of meal and I thought it was pretty average.
The people were extremely friendly though. There was a guy from The Netherlands eating there as well and a table of Japanese people were trying to have a bit of a chat to him. Everyone seemed to be having fun. I ended up eating dinner with the guy who was really nice. He's travelling around Japan for a couple of months as part of a bigger trip.
He is staying in a temple at the other end of the graveyard but for some reason they didn't provide dinner as part of the stay. I thought that was odd since the monks would have had to eat anyway but whatever. Not my problem.
The graveyard is lit up at night and it's a thing to walk through it so I ended up walking back through the graveyard with him to check it out again. We walked past a group who was doing a guided night tour. Hostel guy had told me about this but I didn't really need to pay 1000 yen to hear Japanese ghost stories and have someone lead me down a lit pathway.
The graveyard was really beautiful all lit up. Very different experience to during the day. My phone camera doesn't do very well at night so I don't think I got any good photos but it was a very peaceful experience.
I joined a few others in the common room for a chat before bed. A couple also from The Netherlands (who also ate in the restaurant) and a couple from France. All nice people and we were all only staying for the night.
Sleeping in the capsule was fine but I imagine it could get quite stuffy when it's really hot.
No comments:
Post a Comment