C Travel Adventures: February 2014

Somehow, more than any of the other trips that I have been on, Japan needed summing up. Whether I am up to that task remains to be seen but I at least feel the need to try. One of the many reasons that I enjoy travelling is that I have always felt that there are major systemic issues within western culture that we are often too self-absorbed to notice, let alone rectify. Japan, as an economic superpower with its own unique, independent culture is, in my humble opinion, a place that we in the west can learn a lot from. It has been two weeks since I have been back and I write this from the homely comfort of Hertfordshire, a true world apart. Japan is just an astonishing place - unlike anywhere else I had visited and an absolute must for any would-be world traveller. In our week in the country we were only able to scratch the surface but from this scratching we were able to absorb a remarkable amount about the people, traditions and culture.

Dancing games in an arcade

The people, without any exception that we came across, were up with the most kind, helpful and respectful that I had ever met. The Japanese bow of the head as a greeting is wonderful to behold and is readily used by a wide range of people including policemen and traffic wardens, shopkeepers and waitresses. It doesn’t feel forced or overly formal - just extremely warm and respectful. For the people that we actually came into contact with, there was no limit to the amount that they were willing to help people. On my way from the airport a young girl sat next to me and asked where I was from and where I was heading. When she heard that I was heading towards Kyoto she told me, in very broken English, where her favourite temple was. Using her phone to help her, she wrote me out a full set of instructions to the temple - bus numbers, walking distances and all other useful information. The temple was Kiyozimu-dera and was, of course, well worth the visit. This tendency to translate and write out helpful information was repeated several times throughout the trip.

Relaxation Parlour, Kyoto

One thing that I really noticed was how different the attitude of the people seemed to be. There seemed to be a kind of peaceful contentedness that I (maybe mistakenly) attribute to the Shinto-Buddhist religious traditions combined with the hardworking, pacifist tradition of the post-WW2 nation. I might be totally wrong, and there are plenty of stories in the western media about the apparent breakdown of Japanese culture as people shun real world contact in favour of internet-based relationships. The local people appear to get their kicks in completely different ways to what we are used to. Games arcades are very popular and were found all over the major cities - as were outlets selling ‘anime’ magazines and cartoons. Additionally, and slightly stranger for the western observer, are the 'relaxation parlours’ that are dotted all over the cities. These places allow people to rent out a room with a sofa and TV along with some adult material, for between an hour and a whole day. While these places almost certainly exist in the west as well, in Japan they were very common and people seemed to have no aversion to being seen entering or exiting. Our initial reaction was to think of this as a bit weird - but frankly that was probably partly because of our western prejudice.

The Shinkansen (Bullet Train)

In terms of innovation, Japan was home to a range of things that I have never come across. Obviously the Sony Centre was an insight into technologies that will be commonplace in decades to come, but I was most impressed by the little things. The circulation of free umbrellas in Tokyo was a master stroke, requiring a small amount of external investment (I assume) but was a brilliant idea. Another interesting thing that I had never seen before was the huge amount of electronic toilets that were found in maybe at least 50% of the places that I came across. These toilets looked like a bit of a gimmick at first, but the heated seats were brilliant in the cold weather. The pinnacle of Japanese innovation that we came across was, of course, the bullet train. When looking at the above picture, the slow and clunky trains that I used to travel into London on seem almost farcical. Sitting on the bullet train is more like being on an extremely low-flying plane than on any train that I had ever been on to date. As well as being awesomely fast, the bullet train was also awesomely punctual and with the added bonus of unlimited use through the 'Japan Rail Pass’, travelling around the country was an absolute dream.

Wonderful genuine sushi in Tokyo

As a backpacker, Japan was of course very expensive - but that didn’t mean that it was impossible to find bargains and still have a good time. Hostels were on the whole cheaper than the average I have found in western Europe and of a similar quality, though it is important to not sacrifice location TOO much in order to save money - because with Tokyo being the largest city on earth, journeys from the suburbs can be impractically long. Food is expensive, but it is possible to get around this by having cheap sushi from supermarkets in the day and then being careful with restaurant choices in the evening - though having said that, the food is so excellent that we didn’t want to skimp too much on quality and had some great dinners. All in all, which expensive, the combined cost of the trip was probably cheaper than a one way flight from London to Tokyo so a visit was an absolute must while I was in Hong Kong.

I admit that the above was a somewhat rambling and incoherent summary of my time in Japan and that there are many incomplete or not elaborated points. I hope, however, that if nothing else I have got across what a wonderful place Japan is and what a real eye-opener my brief visit was.

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Asakusa Senso-ji Temple

Day Five: Yanaka, Ueno and Asakusa

The Olympus hospital…

Tokyo, the largest city on earth, was always going to be nigh-on impossible to thoroughly explore in three days and it was very difficult to research and decide what we wanted to see. Additionally, the metro map looks more like a plate of spaghetti than a useful tool for navigation, so we decided to rely fairly heavily on the recommendations of the guidebooks. Before we could start this however we went to visit nearby ‘Electric Street’, which is home to the Tokyo Olympus repair depot, where we tried to get my camera fixed. The depot felt a lot like a hospital for cameras, with waiting rooms and appointments and a specialist was able to tell me that I had broken the shutter and that while he could fix it, the process would take a week (time which I obviously don’t have). Slightly disappointed (but happy that it is treatable) we started to explore.

Yanaka High Street

Ueno Park

We started our visit in the Yanaka district of the city which is on the suburbs and is a far cry from the Tokyo that I had read about and expected to see in the centre. A tangle of busy streets is filled with modern houses, ancient temples and a range of shops with quite a bohemian feel. Our visit to this part of the city essentially gave us an insight into how residents live, with no bonafide sights per se but a pleasant ambiance that made it worth a few hours of the afternoon. Just to the south of Yanaka is the Ueno district, the location of the Ueno park and Tokyo National Museum. This beautiful park is full of temples, lakes and forest as well as several museums. We strolled around here until it got dark, while not going inside anywhere, before moving on to Asakusa.

Senso-ji temple

By now it had got dark (a lot earlier than we were used to in Hong Kong), but everything was still open and we did a bit of souvenir shopping in Asakusa before heading to the Senso-ji temple, perhaps the most popular temple in all of Tokyo. Based around a temple complex, a pagoda and a ceremonial gate, the wider area included shops and restaurants and was very lively. The large lantern in the gate, one of the iconic images of Tokyo, was donated by the city’s geishas. After getting our obligatory photos of the temple we searched for our evening meal - Sergei was pretty hungry and decided to ask a Japanese policeman where he could find some cheap sushi, and with the crime rate so low he was happy to give us a hand. The sushi was great and by Tokyo standards a good price and included a bottle of sake, a rice wine drink which has a reputation far worse than its actual bite and was actually quite pleasant.

Genuine Sushi

Day Six: Harajuku, Shibuya and Shinjuku

Meiji Shrine, Yoyogi Park

The second day of the Tokyo adventure started with a big journey on the JR rail line to the west of the city. The Tokyo metro is extremely confusing, with a range of franchises owning different lines - meaning that changing stations can sometimes mean leaving one station, walking around above ground and then entering another. The flip side of this was that Japan Rail, who issued our rail passes, allowed us to use the pass on any of their franchised lines - meaning that with a bit of planning we could travel around the city for free. Our target was the Harajuku part of town, where we walked through the Yoyogi Park, another of Tokyo’s beautiful autumnal forested areas which contained several shrines including the Meiji Shrine, which is dedicated to the Emperor Meiji who oversaw the modernization of Japan (the so-called ‘Meiji restoration’)and is very highly thought of. Once out of the park we walked through one of the major shopping districts of the city - home to all of the high end fashion outlets and some very interesting architecture.

Shibuya Crossing

We spent a while walking around the shops and had lunch at some street food stalls before stopping for tea at a Moroccan restaurant. While Japanese food is extremely distinctive, the city is also home to cuisine from all over the world and actually has more Michelin starred restaurants than anywhere else. Next up, heading south from Harajuku was the Shibuya district, the main attraction of which is the Shibuya Crossing - arguably the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. We arrived at 2pm, which was probably off-peak and sat in a Starbucks above the crossing watching the world go by. The crossing was the first to use the unique 'everyone cross at once’ system that has now been used in London at the intersection between Oxford and Regent Street. We would have waited around until it got even busier, but were worried that it would be difficult to get out of the area ourselves and we had plenty more to see.

Shinjuku

Managing to stay on the free JR lines we made our way to Shinjuku, one of the most popular districts of the city for tourists as well as one of the major financial centres. As if to prove how popular the district is, Shinjuku station is by far the busiest transport hub in the world - according to wikipedia it has over 200 exits and caters for an average of 3.64 million people every day (about the population of Bosnia…). Unfortunately by this stage it was raining pretty heavily, but the rain gave us the opportunity to observe an ingenious, truly Japanese custom. At some stage, the government of Tokyo obviously decided to flood the city with cheap umbrellas and gave them to all of the restaurants, shops and other buildings in the city. In the rain, people are able to just pick up an umbrella in the building they are occupying then leave it by the door of the destination. By doing so, it is ensured that there is a constant circulation of umbrellas and nobody gets wet.

The Robot Restaurant, Shinjuju

Our goal for the evening was to visit the 'Robot Restaurant’, a true Tokyo institution (for tourists at least). This incredible place, which apparently cost £83 million to construct, is not well known for its food but is all about the show that goes with your meal. Entering from the street and for the cost of about £25, we were given a seat right next to the stage/dance floor and had the most insane hour of my entire life in store. It started with scantly-clad girls playing drums and from there is difficult to describe with words. Basically, there were four 'performances’ that included samurai robots, rainbow afro dancing robots, giant robots, lights, pyrotechnics, a shark robot, pole dancers, a panda riding a cow, loud music and much, much more. It was an astonishing performance, unlike anything I had ever witnessed and was a lot of fun - all of the girls seemed to be having a genuinely good time too. The Robot Restaurant had been recommended by Eric and Sam and I can only pass on the recommendation to future visitors to Tokyo - if you are reading this and you find yourself in the city, move heaven and earth to visit.

The Robot Restaurant

Day Seven: Imperial Palace, Ginza and Akinabashi

Tokyo Station

Our final day in Tokyo (and my final day in Japan) was unfortunately dominated by the rain. We left the hostel mid-morning in a cold drizzle that persisted throughout the day, but were not willing to be put off the sightseeing plan and made our way south to the Imperial Palace. The Palace and its gardens dominate the map of the centre of Tokyo but only a small proportion of the complex is actually open to the public, with the rest being reserved for the Emperor, his family and his guests. The grounds were a five minute walk through the skyscraper-laced city centre from Tokyo Station and were entered by a bridge over a moat. From what we saw, the grounds were more like a park than the fountain/statue/flower-stuffed gardens that would be associated with a European palace, with large grassy areas surrounded by autumnal-coloured leaves. It actually felt more like Central Park in New York City, with the skyscrapers lining the perimeter, but we weren’t willing to stay too long due to the cold rain.

Tokyo Imperial Palace Park

Tokyo International Conference Centre

Heading back towards the station we looked to visit some of the skyscrapers and architecturally interesting buildings in the city centre. After a bit of lunch in one of these, we found the stunning Tokyo International Conference Centre, which looks a lot like a 21^st century ship and was the first Japanese structure to win an international architecture award. The grand design feels like it deserves to house something more epic than conferences and was quite quiet, but was nice to wander around for a while, not least to be out of the cold. Next up was the ‘Ginza’ district of the city, which Lonely Planet describes at the Tokyo equivalent of Fifth Avenue or Oxford Street. This was where the leading clothes and electronics shops could be found and we decided to dive inside the Sony Centre – the main outlet for Sony in Tokyo and the place where concepts and not-yet-released products are tested out. It was therefore an opportunity to explore some of the new technologies that might be commonplace in ten years’ time. Amongst these were:

the most amazing televisions I have ever seen,
Bluetooth camera lenses to be used with smart phones,
glasses that are used with a PS3 to allow two people to play simultaneously on the same screen and yet see two totally different images,
a headset that allows a HD movie to be played through a pair of glasses

Tokyo Sony Centre

The maid cafe…

We were all thoroughly impressed. The rain was getting heavier unfortunately by this stage so we decided to make our way to a different part of the city closer to our hostel – Akinabashi, which is famous for its love of anime (Japanese cartoons) and other thoroughly Japanese forms of entertainment. A recommendation by Eric and Sam (who had come up trumps with the Robot Restaurant yesterday) led us to the “@home café”. This place is proving quite a challenge to describe as it is unlike anything else that I have ever experienced and if I get the description wrong, may lead the reader to see me as a complete weirdo. The café is coloured almost entirely pink and the waitresses are all dressed as French maids. All of the food and drink looks like it is seemingly aimed towards a six year old girl (think tomato ketchup smiley faces and pink tableware) and yet clients are usually adults. A range of set menus ranged from receiving a drink and having a photo with a waitress, to having a full meal and being allowed five minutes to play a game of cards with a waitress. We were given a card with pictures of all of the waitresses on when we sat down and were able to choose which one we wanted our photos with and, unbelievably there were lots of tables with young men (who had arrived by themselves) sitting drinking a milkshake playing snap with the waitresses. Up to this point you might be thinking it was completely seedy, but it was made very clear that clients were not allowed to ask any details of the maids (let alone have any physical contact) and that no photos were allowed. In fact there were several families eating there. It was like the most innocent brothel on earth and further proves how completely culturally unique Japan is. We left in quite a daze and made our way back to the hostel where I picked up my bag and made my way back to Osaka where I was staying overnight ready for my flight in the morning.

I have finished this post fairly abruptly because Japan has been such a novel experience that I feel obliged to write some kind of summary and evaluation of the trip.

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The Bomb Dome

Some cities, no matter what else they have to offer and what else they may have made of themselves, will always be indelibly related to certain events. Hiroshima is perhaps top of these places, a city of 1.2 million people which will always be tied to the United States atomic bomb attack – the first of only two occasions in human history where full-scale nuclear weapons have been used. The journey from Osaka was on the famous bullet train and took just an hour and a half (which is impressive when you look at the map), allowing us to get up early and arrive before 10. While there is no subway in Hiroshima, an equally efficient ‘streetcar’ system operates and links the station with the city centre.

Monument Inside the Peace Park

Our plan was to go straight to the Atomic Bomb Peace Park, the area close to the epicentre of the blast which is now entirely dedicated to museums and memorials about the bombing. The first thing that you see is the so-called ‘Atomic Bomb Dome’, which is an iconic building that incredibly survived the attack almost intact. For all of the structural engineers who might be reading this, the preservation of the building was, amazingly, because the bomb detonated almost directly overhead and therefore only exposed the structure to vertical loading, which the columns of the buildings could withstand – whereas surrounding structures were struck with a horizontal stress of an enormous 19 tons per square metre. The occupants of the building were obviously killed by the heat and radiation however and the structure did take considerable damage – leading to a debate about whether to knock it down or keep it as an iconic, though painful, reminder of the attack. The latter argument prevailed and now it stands, spookily empty, between modern buildings.

The aftermath

A replica of the bomb itself

From the dome, we made our way into the Peace Park itself, walking past several memorials to different groups - students, Korean slave-labourers (who were 1 in 10 of the victims) and others, and also saw the memorial flame which is set to keep burning until the world is free of nuclear weapons. At the end of the park is the museum – a must visit site for anybody who comes to Hiroshima. The museum is split into two wings. The first of these is rather dry and is dedicated to the history of the city as well as the military build up to the bombing. For me, the highlight of the first wing was a copy of the letters of condemnation which every mayor of Hiroshima has sent to international leaders (from George Bush to Kim-Jung Il) every time that they have tested a nuclear weapon since the Hiroshima attack – there are 609 letters, the last of which is addressed to Barack Obama from October of this year.

A watch stopped by the blast

Where the first wing is relatively dry however, the second wing is brutally real. The wing has been designed around a mock-up of the city immediately after the attack, with low orange lighting, piles of rubble and dilapidated buildings. The centre of the room is a model of the city after the bomb exploded which argued that the bomb was, for a very short period of time, the equivalent of a second sun existing 600 metres above the city – which really puts the carnage into perspective. The exhibits are truly haunting, make difficult viewing and include the following (amongst many, many others):

The flaked skin and finger nails that were the only remains of a small boy – kept by his mother to show his father who had been fighting at the front.
The shadow on a stone wall of a person who had been standing by it – forever burned into the stone by the blast.
A schoolboy’s metal lunchbox with the charred food still inside.
The story of a young girl who survived the explosion and lived for ten years perfectly healthily, only to later contract leukaemia. She believed that if she could fold 1000 origami cranes (a Japanese symbol of revival), she would get better. She died before she reached that figure but her story was broadcast to the nation, causing the Japanese population to begin a national drive to fold origami cranes – which are now found all over the memorial area.
Photos of the burns, mutations and scars suffered by victims – one of the most striking of which for me in terms of the effects of radiation was the photo of a man’s hand, which had been resting on his windowsill when the blast occurred, exposing the tips of his fingers to radiation and causing his finger nails to grow black and curled (as well as faster) for the rest of his life.

The bomb was the equivalent power of a second sun sitting in the position shown

At the end of the exhibit there is a petition, set up by the mayor of Hiroshima, to protest against the continued testing of nuclear weapons – which has half a million signatures, now including my own. Keen to not just come to Hiroshima to see the legacy of the bomb, we then spent a few hours strolling around the rest of the city, the highlight of which was Hiroshima castle. Built in the same style as the one in Osaka (and like the one in Osaka, a remake but for totally different reasons), the castle and the surrounding fortifications and park were actually very beautiful and are definitely worthy of being tourist sights in their own respect. In the mid afternoon we made our way back to the station and then travelled on two bullet trains on to Tokyo, via Osaka, where we would be staying for the next three nights.

Hiroshima Castle

The black rain on a paper wall

Hiroshima was a harrowing place to visit and is obviously the location of an unspeakable tragedy. However it is very different to some of the other sites of human tragedies that I had visited, such as Auschwitz in Poland, the Killing Fields in Cambodia or Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. In all of these three cases, the tragedy was pure genocide, committed by an authoritarian regime against its own people, or people that they had subjugated. There can be no excuse whatsoever for Auschwitz, or the Killing Fields or Halabja - it was pure, industrial-scale murder. In Hiroshima however, there is slightly more of a debate - not of whether it was a tragedy or not (every death is a tragedy), but whether it was totally unjustified. 150,000 people are estimated to have died in or as a result of the bombing, the vast majority of whom were civilians. But then, thousands of civilians died on both sides in World War Two - think of Dresden or the Blitz, not to mention the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Hiroshima therefore, to me, represents the absolute horror and folly of war itself - a horror that is subtly different to that in the three terrible places mentioned above which were the sights of tragedies that occurred separate to war. I think that the citizens and government of Hiroshima have realised that and this is why there is no sense of vengeance in the city - they have acknowledged that the ‘tit-for-tat’ of war, that began with Pearl Harbour and ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can only be countered by support for pure, unadulterated peace and in that sense I left the city with far more sense of faith in humanity than I did in Auschwitz, the Killing Fields or Halabja.

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Osaka Castle

Osaka, along with Kyoto and Kobe makes up the area of Keihanshin, an urban area of nearly 19 million people with an economic output as high as London or Paris. The journey between Kyoto and Osaka the previous night had only taken thirty minutes, making the two cities natural partners within out itinerary. As it was to be a bit of a squeeze however, we only really had one full day in Osaka so had to really make the most of it. A big group of us had been out for dinner the previous evening and decided that we all wanted to split up to do our own thing the next day before meeting up again in the evening. Myself, Heloise and Sergei got up early and walked for about an hour to the north towards the Osaka castle. Despite being an economic powerhouse and having a population twice the size, Osaka doesn’t have as much to see as Kyoto in terms of traditional Japanese sites. The castle is one area that Osaka outperforms Kyoto however and the dramatic structure (a reconstruction of an earlier version that was destroyed in a fire) is every bit the Japan that I hoped to come across. We spent a lot of the early afternoon wandering around the grounds of the castle and visited the inside (which wasn’t actually that good - the reconstruction hadn’t kept the traditional interior and it was now a modern museum).

Autumn Leaves in Osaka (one of the last pictures with my good camera…)

Down by the Yodo River, Osaka

Our next stop after the castle was the central business area of the city, based around Osaka station and one of the major financial hubs of Asia. The journey from the castle to the financial district took us along the banks of the river and while we were walking I committed one of the ultimate backpacker sins and dropped my camera. At first it seemed fine, but it soon became clear that it wasn’t happy and I had to switch to taking pictures on my phone, which I am pretty gutted about considering just how photogenic the country has been thus far and how much there was still to see. Not willing to sit around mourning the maiming of my camera however, we carried on with our walking tour past a range of modern skyscrapers and beautiful older style brick buildings, eventually reaching our destination - the Osaka Sky Garden, on top of the tallest building in the city. The view from the top was stunning (and could only be adequately captured by Heloise’s camera, now that mine had stopped working):

View over downtown Osaka

View towards Osaka Bay along the river

Osaka German Christmas Market

Below the Sky Garden we came across a very pleasant (and out of place seeming) German Christmas market, complete with mulled wine and sausage. We had spent the whole day walking so made our way half way back to the hostel on the Osaka metro, which was pretty easy to use. We got out at Shinsaibashi, the city’s main shopping street and stopped for dinner at a traditional looking, local-filled, diner. The city is sometimes called the Venice of the East due to its extensive network of canals (along with a whole lot of other Asian cities including Hanoi, Bangkok and Dhaka), and we spent the rest of the evening walking through the shopping district by the canals. Along with shops, the area was also full of arcades - seemingly one of the favourite pastimes of locals where people come to play games ranging from pinball to those ‘grab-a-toy’ games. Eventually we made our way back to the hostel ready for an early night - as we were visiting Hiroshima in the morning. I had been very impressed with Osaka and could have happily spent a few days in the city. At first there didn’t appear to be much going on, but it had the vibrancy and pulse of an economic centre with a bit of culture on the side.

Advertising Boards in Central Osaka

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Day One: Downtown and Arashiyama

The trip started with a 1.15am flight from Hong Kong to Kansai Airporrt with the slightly dubiously named “Peach Aviation”. Just about the most inconvenient time that I have ever flown, I landed at about 6am and made my way from Kansai to Kyoto. As we (I was set to meet others on the way) were planning to use trains a lot, we opted to get a “Japan Rail Pass” which essentially gave unlimited access to the vast majority of the rail network during a one week period. The pass, available only to foreigners, had to be ordered beforehand and activated upon arrival. The journey to Kyoto took about 50 minutes and was totally painless, so I checked in at the Piece Hostel where I would be staying and began sightseeing.

Nishi Hongan-ji Temple

My hostel was located near to the station and from here I made my way north, passing and entering two key temples on the way – the Nishi Hongan-ji and Higashi Hongan-ji. The latter of these was apparently the largest wooden building in the world but was covered in a ridiculously comprehensive scaffolding unit for repair works – creating a cladding that was so total that I actually thought the building was a factory. As it stands it looks like the monks are batching cement on the side. The weather wasn’t tremendous at this stage, but I decided to persevere and carried on north, towards the Imperial Palace Park. Kyoto was the capital of Japan for a long period of time and the palace is still the location of coronations for new Emperors (the Emperor of Japan is now a ceremonial post, but it is the longest continuous royal line in the world). Entry to the palace requires special permits, which I did not have the time to pursue, but the grounds of the park are open to the public and were a great place to sit and eat supermarket-bought sushi amongst the trees that remarkably were still bearing coloured leaves from across the autumnal spectrum – despite it being mid-December here.

Nijo-jo, Kyoto

The major sites in Kyoto are actually not in the city centre and are in the hills that overlook the city on the outskirts and as a result I was keen to get an overview of the centre without spending too much time there. I had one last place that I wished to visit however – the Nijo-jo castle which was home to a Tokugawa shogun and is a network of fortifications, palaces and temples that are preserved as a museum. One of the most interesting things in the museum was the flooring, which whistled as you walked shoeless on the floorboards. The whistling is actually designed by squeezing floodboards closely enough together that the air whistles out through the small crack when they are stepped on – a feature that the Japanese call a “Nightingale floor” and was used as a security measure.

the Bamboo Grove

Having seen a lot of the inner city sites, I made my way to a suburban rail station and travelled west to the Arashiyama district. The brief journey was free with my rail pass. The Arashiyama district is one of the key historical areas of the city and is home to UNESCO World Heritage Site (of which Kyoto has a massive 17) temples spaced amongst a bamboo grove, one of the surrealist places I had ever visited. Somehow the dead straight lines of the bamboo, as well as the hollow “knocking” sound that they make as they bump into each other in the wind (like a wind-chime), give the area a slightly spooky feel. The temples themselves were well worth visiting too and, situated amongst autumnal trees, I almost felt that I was back in the Lake District or Scottish Highlands. This in itself is a weird experience as up until this point I had only visited Buddhist temples in the hot and muggy regions of Hong Kong and South East Asia – so walking around in a winter coat and scarf was different in itself. I spent a few hours in the bamboo grove, moving from temple to temple, until finding one which was situated on a hill from which I watched the sun set over Kyoto. The Arashiyama district was pleasant in itself and on my way back to the station I stopped for a coffee in a boutique shopping area. The train took me right back to Kyoto main station and I went back to the hostel to meet Eric and Sam, an American and British UST friend respectively, who had arrived that day from Tokyo. As it was our only evening in the city we decided to head for the centre for dinner at a traditional Japanese restaurant. The food was excellent and is so different to any of the cuisines that I am used to regularly eating in Europe – a mix of grilled meat and fish with interesting vegetables and sushi.

Tenryu-ji Temple

Day Two: Fushimi Inari-taisha and Higashiyama

Fushimi Inari-taisha

Having realised yesterday that two days in Kyoto was far, far too little time, I got up early and set about trying to see as much as possible still. Walking south east from the hostel for an hour or so along the river, I made it to Fushimi Inari-taisha, a large shrine that is one of the iconic images of Kyoto. The shrine consists of several kilometres of paths covered by bright orange wooden gates called torii, which symbolise the transition from the ‘profane to the sacred’. The religion of the shrine is the 'Inari Okami’ branch of Shintoism. It is pretty difficult to describe the beliefs of Japan as they don’t fall within the same easily divisible sections as western religion. Shinto is the spiritual religion of Japan and is more a way of life that connects the country with its past - it has only traditions and rituals and is not a way of explaining the universe. As a result, it is able to happily coexist with Buddhism (which itself is tolerant of other beliefs) and means that Japanese people would happily say that they have many beliefs. It is difficult to explain really and also reasonably difficult to comprehend for a westerner who is used to the dogmatic tribalism of our own religions. The shrine itself was beautiful and while the head of the trails were full of people, it was quite easy to walk off along one of the many paths and find a quiet empty section. I spent a few hours wandering around the trails before heading north along the east bank of the river towards the the main temple quarter of the city.

Kiyomizu-dera

The Higashiyama district is home to many of the major sites in Kyoto - though with so many world heritage sites, there are frankly things to do wherever you go. My first stop was the Kiyomizu-dera temple, which was about a 30 minute walk from Fushimi Inari-taisha. This temple is named after the Japanese word for pure water (Kiyomizu) as it is founded upon a waterfall. The building itself was built without any nails and is in a dramatic location, perched on stilts above a small valley containing the waterfall - but, in true Alex Coles travelling tradition, there was unfortunately a lot of scaffolding around. One of the major plus points of the temple was the fact that it is located in the hills surrounding the city and therefore gave excellent views back towards the centre of Kyoto and the mountains beyond. The whole district was full of shrines and temples and on my way back towards the centre I was able to pop my head inside a few.

View from Kiyomizu-dera towards Kyoto

Kyoto Station

By now it was lunchtime and I had arranged to return to Kyoto station to meet up with Sam and Eric who had spent the morning at the bamboo shrine. We said that we would meet at the bullet train ticket office, but it turned out that there were in fact three such offices and with none of our phones working in Japan, we ended up spending an hour wandering around the station trying to bump into each other - eventually succeeding when we both managed to log onto free WiFi. Having spent the morning in the hills at the old wooden temples and shrines, Kyoto station couldn’t have been any more of a contrast. Set around a vast glass and steel atrium with escalators and walkways with restaurants and shops, it was of little surprise in hindsight that the three of us struggled to meet up. Having spent so long to find each other we decided to cut our losses and split up again to carry on seeing the parts of the city we wanted to see separately before meeting up in the evening to head over to Osaka by train.

Maruyama Park

This gave me the rest of the afternoon to see as much of the rest of Kyoto as possible and I decided to head back to Higashiyama on the other side of the river. My aim was to get as far as the Shoren-in temple, which is only about halfway through the district - leaving the other half totally undiscovered (a future trip back to Kyoto is a must). I made my way through the Gion part of town, which is well known as the entertainment district and home of the famous geishas of Kyoto - another reason to come back. Within Gion was the Yasaka Shrine, another beautiful temple with a large wooded area behind called Maruyama Park. My last stop of the day was Shoren-in, a temple that came well recommended in Lonely Planet but which didn’t seem to jump out of the tourist map. When I arrived it didn’t seem much to look at, but as it was getting close to closing time I was the last person inside and had it to myself - allowing a really pleasant thirty minutes walking bare foot through the temple and its gardens. Having done the best I could with two days in Kyoto, I headed back to the hostel to pick up my bag and then met Sam and Eric for our trip to Osaka - a journey of only thirty minutes. Once there, we met up with Sergei and Heloise who would be travelling with me for the rest of the trip and we all went to dinner with two American guys that we had met at the hostel.