Day 10: Arashiyama (original) (raw)
Got up late today, and only just made it in time for breakfast before heading out to the Arashiyama District. We found out that we’d got on the wrong train the minute Arashiyama station zoomed past us – we must have got on the “rapid” service, which ended up taking us a few more stations along to a place called Kameoka. I remembered that in our guide book it said there is a 2-hour scenic boat trip from Kameoka to Arashiyama, so we though fate had intervened and we had come here for a reason! Along we trotted for 10 minutes getting all hot and sweaty trying to find the boat station, only to find that it was closed today! A short walk back to the station and a train journey later and we finally arrived at Arashiyama.
The guide book and the web site says “this popular touristy district…”, but when we got off the train it felt like we were in some quiet suburb of Kyoto that no tourist has ever set foot in. There were no signs in English, no “you are here” maps that we’ve seen everywhere else, no nothing! We followed the main road for a bit and just as we were giving up hope and were going to turn back, Kate spotted a small Torii in the corner of her eye! “Lets just go round this corner…” we said, and turning the corner we emerged into the Bamboo Forest (one of the placed highlighted in the guide book). The forest was cool, and we strolled through it for a while until we came across the area’s main temple, Tenryuji. Damn it was hot today, so before checking out the temple and its zen garden, we sat for a bit to get our strength back.
The zen garden was really beautiful, so delicately and neatly kept, with a big lake in the middle of it, loads of trees, bushes, fountains and statues, and a few shrines spotted here and there. It must take so much work to keep the garden in such a perfect state. We passed a few gardeners on our way round, and they seemed to be inspecting every tiny bit of earth picking up any rogue bits of leaf/dirt/grass. Crazy stuff. The garden did look amazing though.
Got back to the hotel a bit earlier today, so I uploaded the latest photos and we had a short kip before going out to dinner. We found a nice restaurant in the back streets of the Shijo district of Kyoto, overlooking the river. I had a grilled chicken dish with rice, and kate had a chicken curry dish. Was pretty good, not as good as Bikash, but pretty good. 🙂
After dinner, we went to get me another Egg Tart, and had a browse in the shops before coming back. One more day here in Kyoto, tomorrow we have 1 more temple to see, and then we’re going shopping. We spotted a Mexican restaurant tonight, so if we can find it again tomorrow we’ll go there for dinner.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Holidays, Japan Holiday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.