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.

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.

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. 

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.