Golden Week: Kyoto

 

I'll admit this post is being published almost a month after I got back from golden week, but I couldn't leave out the last leg of our journey, Kyoto! We arrived in the evening quite late, and found our hostel, the khaosan guest house: a very clean and modern youth hostel, if a little expensive. After a really proper night out on the town in Gion, (so awesome I don't have any pictures), we set out early in the morning.

The weather, like most of the week was gorgeous, we couldn't ask for anything better! 
We first headed to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, which is probably one of the coolest places you can go in Kyoto.

The shrine it self isn't too special, but behind the shrine, winding its way up the mountain side, is a trail, along which are build thousands of red tori-gates.  You can spend hours walking up the trail to the small shrine atop the mountain, most of the time underneath the wooden cross pieces of the gates, with the peaceful green forest peeking through the finger width cracks between each individual gate.

The Shrine Maidens make their rounds in their standard shockingly orange robes.

We met up with the girls a few minutes up the shrine, stumbling into eachother as they came down from their aborted attempt at walking up the whole trail. In Olivia's words "It's just more gates". We didn't end up hiking the whole way that time, but I can hardly imagine a more unique, if homogenous, hiking trail.

 

After leaving the shrine, we biked over to the venue for a horse-archery tournament.

It took a while for the thing to get started, mostly the three archers pacing back and forth along the pitch on horse back. Some people in Kimono dressed up like edo period aristocrats  paraded along with them for a while, and then the action started.

Our view wasn't very good because of the packed venue, but I managed to get a few rapid shots of the actual bowmanship. The thing is, It's over so quickly, that you can hardly see if with your eyes. The rider gallops full throttle towards the target, which takes very little time; you see a flash of color, and then you hear the crack of wood breaking. A few pieces fly through the air, and then the rider slows to a canter and doubles back to his starting place.

 

Our last stop in Kyoto was the famous golden temple. True to its name, the temple's top two stories are entirely coated in real gold leaf.  We only managed to see it in the overcast weather that afternoon, but it was still a pretty spectacular sight!

 

 Because we loved Osaka so much, we spent very little actual time in Kyoto. But it is definitely an interesting city to visit, a far cry from the dense urban centres of Tokyo and Nagoya that we are used to. Every where you go there are older buildings, the city is far less built up, and preserves a lot more green space. Not to mention the fact that the streets in Kyoto are more like North-American streets, running primarily along compass axises.

Kyoto brings to an end a wonderful week of exploring Japan, with some of the best weather I've seen in my life. I hope I get to see alot more of Japan in my remaining months here, but even six months is too short to really explore all that Japan has to offer, Its a country with so many interesting places, and Golden Week has only given me the taste to see more!