As it would be my last in Kyoto, and I'd seen little of the important temples and exciting sights, today was a very busy, hardcore sightseeing day.
I started at about 10 a.m. and got a bus to Kinkaku-ji (Temple), which means Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
*Quick note here: -ji and -jo mean temple and castle, respectively, so saying Kinkaku-ji Temple is redundant and so from this point on, I won't write Temple after the name, but you'll be able to differentiate it from anything else because of the -ji ending.
From there, I walked over to Ryoan-ji, which is known for its famous Zen Rock Garden. It's supposed to inspire meditation but I just didn't get it.
Part of the gardens nearby however had some lovely cherry blossom trees though is a nice, quiet setting, though the petals were already snowing. I didn't know it at the time, but this was as close as I would come to my vision of cherry blossoms in Japan. Had the woman I'd asked at the hostel told me about it a few days earlier, I could've gone when it was perfect.
I left Ryoan-ji, bought an ice cream cone, as it was slightly warmer (maybe in the late-50s?) and caught a bus to the Kyoto Imperial Palace and Park. You can't go inside the palace itself, but you can walk around the park and see it from there, which is just what I did.
It was about two o'clock by this time and my ice cream had not been a very filling lunch, so on my way walking over to Nijo-jo, I stopped in at another Japanese fast food/diner place for a cheap meal. I was initially reluctant to go to Nijo-jo because of time constraints and the price but I'm so glad I did. The best part was inside, where you weren't allowed to take pictures, but many of the rooms had moveable panels of gorgeous, though simple, paintings of nature or animals floating in a gilded sky.
It also had lovely gardens and a foot thick iron/bronze? gate:
Inside the castle there was a wedding procession that was also interesting to see.
I took a bus to train station, where I took a picture, though I'd been there several times already, from which point I jumped on a train to Fushimi Inari Shrine, which was really impressive and different from anything I'd seen so far, and, after about half an hour, really repetitive.
I hiked up the mountain the shrine was embedded in and was quite happy to see the Japanese tourists were struggling and more out of shape than I was, even if that seems a bit mean, before coming to a clearing with a nice view of the city that looked terrible when I tried to photograph it.
I got a bit confused and was unsure if I was basically at the top or not, but decided I'd been going for long enough so headed downhill. I got lost in a maze of orange wood and pine trees. Apparently there were several different paths of shrines to traverse and I went the wrong way so somehow, I ended up lost in the woods in the middle of a fairly large city. I kept going down and checked my direction against the sun as I knew I had to go west to get back to the train station, but because of the paths available, I hiked much farther north than I'd intended. Eventually I found myself on some small residential roads and wandered west from them but still got nowhere. I saw a temple which I hoped was the base temple area of Fushimi Inari but I was on the wrong side so I just hopped a gate and walked toward the center, passing some monks on the way. I found the center of the temple, though by that time I'd realized it was not the right one, and walked out through the entrance. The English signs told me I'd been walking through Tofukuji, another of Kyoto's 200-plus. This was actually one of the famous ones I'd considered seeing and had now managed to do so without paying the entry fee! I was too tired to actually explore it, so I just snapped a few pictures and walked by to my hostel, which by this point was close enough, as I'd gone so far North.
I rested there for a long while, but had a bit more energy than expected so I went out to get some dinner, buy some supplies for the train ride the next day and see Toji, yet another temple I'd wanted to see (this one famous because it was the tallest pagoda in Japan). I couldn't go in the complex of course, as it was closed, but it happened to be quite lovely lit up at night as it was and I was very happy with my decisions for the day and the way it had turned out.
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