temple – Rainwater Rambling

Japan 2018 Day 14: Kyoto

May 16, 2018 richardt

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We were up early this morning to head to the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, known for its winding path of torii gates. The guidebooks said you need to go early to get pictures without anyone else in them.

There is a hike up through the gates.

This guy was painting one of the tori gates.

Time for a snack. A tsukemono cucumber on a stick.

Our next stop was the Nishiki market. Some expensive rice.

Some octopus on a stick.

There was a Peanuts store.

A giant container of umeboshi.

There was a tsukemono sampling station. It was delicious.

Gillian with a bottle of umeboshi.

Gillian enjoying a tskeumono cucumber on a stick.

The market was in an indoor mall.

Lunch was at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant.

After lunch we visited the Toji Temple and its gardens.

Another heron fishing for lunch.

And then it flew off.

Some fire buckets.

The Japanese Colonel.

In the evening we headed to the Gion area.

We spotted another geisha.

There was some sumo wrestling on the television at the hotel.

Japan 2018 Day 13: Kyoto

May 15, 2018 richardt

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bird geisha japan kyoto monkey temple

Today we went Arashiyama’s monkey park, where they have macaque monkeys roaming around. We got there early, so had to wait for it to open. There was a heron on the river bank.

The monkeys are able roam around the park.

There were some babies sticking close to their mothers.

This was the oldest monkey in the park.

You can go inside the building and feed the monkeys.

The next stop was Arashiyama’s Bamboo Grove.

Next it was on to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji).

The buses were crowded.

We headed to Nijo Castle. Here is an umbrella stand, that lets you lock up your umbrella. Gillian needed one of these in Hiroshima, where someone took her hotel loaner umbrella from a stand outside of a 7-11.

We ended the day geisha spotting in a small neighbourhood in Kyoto.

These were magnets on the back of the hotel door. Depending on which service you wanted you would put the magnet on the door.

Japan 2018 Day 12: Hiroshima to Kyoto

May 14, 2018 richardt

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hiroshima japan kyoto temple totoro

Today we were heading to Kyoto, but since the weather was so good, we returned to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park today to see the memorial cenotaph and a few other memorials we didn’t get to see during the rain yesterday.

Some of the millions of paper cranes at the Children’s Peace Monument.

Looking up along a street, that’s a lot of wires.

Another cool parking lot.

It was back on the bullet train to Kyoto.

We headed to the Kiyomizu-dera temple.

There were lots of people wearing Kimonos.

The streets were busy.

We found a Studio Ghibli store.

Gillian with her Totoro friends.

We had somen for lunch today.

Carp flags hanging outside of a school.

We made our way to Nanzen-ji temple.

It has a raised aqueduct that was built in 1890. It is part of the Lake Biwa Canal and it still supplies 97% of the city’s water.

Japan 2018 Day 9: Osaka to Nachi-Katsuura

May 11, 2018 richardt

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japan nachi-katsuura ryokan temple train waterfall

Today we headed to Nachi-Katsuura in the Wakayama region. This is the area Dad’s family came from.

There are a lot of cemeteries along the way.

Once we got off the train, we left our bags in a locker by the hotel and then caught a bus to Nachi Falls. Shanna and Gillian hiked from the bottom up to the waterfall, Susan and I stayed on the bus a couple of stops more to have a shorted walk to Nachi Falls.

Nachi Falls in Nachikatsuura, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, is one of the best-known waterfalls in Japan. With a drop of 133 meters, it is the country’s tallest water fall with single uninterrupted drop