Fushimi Inari

We arrived in Kyoto in the early afternoon on Sunday, to find it colder than Hakuba. The original plan was to put our luggage in a locker and see a couple temples in the north. Kyoto is a busy place it seems and all the lockers were in use. So instead, after arming ourselves with some maps from the information place, we walked to our hotel. Which turned out to be very close. According to Brandon it was also very close to Fushimi Inari.

It turned out it was not all that close to the hotel. But we survived the walk there and back. Fushimi Inari is a shrine of the Inari cult and included 4kms of paths with many, many tori gates over the path. Companies sponsor the tori gates to bring them luck, and the letter on them is the name of the sponsoring company. Entry is free and it is a very popular spot, making it hard to get photos without people in them. However, I discovered if you pull out a tripod, people stop for you.

After wandering through the shrine, we went back to check into our hotel. I had been requesting high rooms with all our bookings, in the hope we would get a view over a city. We got a nice view of the wall next door in Tokyo, but we got lucky here.

After my poor sleep the night before, I couldn't be bothered motivating Brandon to see the Gion district in the night, when it's meant to be most stunning. Instead, we headed for dinner at a "meat-on-a-stick" place that was marked on a map our hotel gave us. It turned out that very little English was spoken in said "restaurant" and we got a lot of stares as we walked in. It was tasty, although we avoided the chicken ovaries and heart that were on the menu.