Friday 10 April Shrines and temples

Awoke to grey skies and rain forecast for most of the day. But like the Scouts, we are well prepared. After breakfast it is an 8am start for a full touring day of shrines and temples. We head off with our group of 21 in a coach to Arashiyama to initially wander through the bamboo groves. Pity the sun wasnt out as it would have really shown the bamboo groves at their best.

We then see the Tenryuji temple, enshrined by UNESCO as a world heritage site. The gardens are lovely too but the whole place is very crowded so hard to get photos to do it all justice, plus the rain hasn't helped.

Now it is time for lunch so we head to a local French Japanese restaurant where we have a lovely lunch of more things I mainly can't identify but enjoy all the same!

Back on the coach and we head for Kinkakuji temple, also known as the Golden Pavilion, and also a world heritage site. It is a lovely Zen temple that features a golden exterior, made up of 200,000 gold leaf squares. Once again, we could have done with sunshine to show it off at its best, but it was still impressive, and even more so impressive was me struggling to take photos one handed while holding up my umbrella with the other. Lovely gardens surrounded the temple.

The bonsai fir tree is 600 years old and is shaped like a boat as it points westward.

Afterwards we visited the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. It was featuted in the movie, Memories of a Geisha for those with good memories. It is known for the thousands of red tori gates that meander through the sacred forest of Mount Inari. The site has been voted by visitors to Kyoto as the number one must see spot. It really was impressive, but so many people that it took away the wow factor.

It is now time to return to the coach and head back to our hotel.

We didnt get back until almost 6pm so it has been a long day with lots of walking in the rain. Back in our room and time for a cuppa and repack the suitcase as we leave tomorrow to board the ship. We decide to have a late dinner in the hotel restaurant. I had a beef curry which was very nice but the service was very slow to non existent so we made our way back to our room, caught up the blog and put ourselves to bed.