Having spent a good couple of hours looking around Kyoto I decided it was time to get out and head to Nara.
Actually it wasn’t nearly so dramatic. Nara is only an hour away on the train and it’s a much smaller, though culturally nearly as important, place. I’d be back in Kyoto in time for sunset at the Silver Pavilion.
Two things that immediately stood out were the long, shady lanes lined with these lanterns. The paths invariably had long lines of school children, some of whom would try their English on me. Even in fragments it was always way better than my Japanese.
But these are not the things that Nara is famous for. It’s the deer that roam everywhere. They are curious, tame and a menace if you carelessly hold your map within easy reach. It turns out that they’ll eat almost anything. If a map was considered a tasty snack, I didn’t like to think how aggressive they’d be with my lunch so I hid from them while I munched.
While searching for the other thing that Nara is famous for — made more difficult because of the missing map — I stumbled across a few more temples and these lamps.
Before I got to the main “feature” I found a lot of school children, presumably in art class, painting the surroundings.
When I tried to get inside I also timed it very badly ((This is normal. If I pick a line at the super market or passport control or security I can almost guarantee that it’ll be the longest one.)). Almost every kid in the prefecture was trying to get to see the same thing as me.
And once inside Todaiji they were all there talking pictures of each other and of the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world.
It’s huge, though it’s difficult to grasp a sense of scale since it’s inside a building. Depending on where you look, this is described as the largest wooden structure in the world. Or maybe that was the old version.
After seeing the statue I meandered back through the park and towards to the train station.
Having “done” the big city and the nature, it was time to take in some culture. Kyoto and Nara are the “old” parts of Japan with many of the most beautiful and most famous temples. I didn’t see all of them but I did pretty well! The difference in character between them was fascinating.
Pretty much straight off the Shinkansen I headed to Kiyomizudera. This was, by far, the busiest and most crowded temple of the trip ((There was one in Nara that came close, but the busy-ness was isolated. Here it was everywhere!)). Quite an odd atmosphere for a temple in any case.
Views away from the temple were also worth taking. You could see much of Kyoto from the top.
As is typical in temples and Japan in general, you have to take your shoes off before you enter. I liked the contrast between the formal, the casual and the furry. I deliberately brought slip-on shoes to Japan to make this kind of operation easier but fate conspired against me and I ended up wearing my walking shoes on days when, perhaps, I should have taken the Vans.
After Kiyomizudera I headed downhill and found a whole host of other, smaller temples. This one had hundreds of lanterns all around.
My favourite temple in Kyoto was the Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji). The first thing to note about the Silver Pavilion is that it’s not silver.
They never quite finished it. But what they did finish was very tranquil and beautiful.
One nice thing was that it was much bigger than it looked. After the sand garden were some ponds, more temples.
And some more views back over Kyoto.
Even mundane elements looked attractive in the long, evening light.
At the other end of town is the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji). This one actually lives up to its name, having plenty of gold on show.
Compared with the Silver Pavilion, however, what it lacked was subtlety. You walk in the gate and it’s there, right in front of you.
Big. Golden. Pavilion-y.
To be fair I’m selling it very short. There was more to it than just the Pavilion, and it was all well worth seeing.
The final temple of the trip was Ryoanji, which had a different feel and pace again. This was was more about the gardens, though there were temples in the grounds.
One of the central points was a large sand garden. Lots of people just sat in contemplation.
It was bright and in direct sunlight at the time I was there, so I sat around the corner in the shade!
The next instalment will be of Nara which is a smaller but older capital city.
For my last day in Nagano Prefecture I had set my sights on Kamikochi, known as one of the most scenic parts of the Japanese Alps. However, the night before I had pretty much given up all home. It had been raining heavily and it was so cloudy that you couldn’t really see the mountains around Matsumoto ((Mountains hiding, of course, had already become a bit of a theme for this trip.)), much less those any higher up.
But the next morning things looked very different. It was a bright day, with a clear blue sky and a slight chill in the air — it was, after all, October. The forecast still wasn’t promising but I thought it was worth the risk.
Luckily I was right.
Much like my trip to Yosemite last year, I didn’t stray too far from the main, well trodden parts. I’d love to have had more time, but you know how it is…
I started at the main Bus Terminal (who says travel isn’t glamorous?) and took a coach up the twisty roads to the Kappa Bridge area. A Kappa, incidentally, is a sort of troll or water sprite if you believe Wikipedia. People crossing this part of the river with things balanced on their heads look, if you have poor eye-sight, a little like a kappa, hence the name of the bridge.
As a contrast to Tokyo you really couldn’t get much more complete. There were times when there were no other people visible at all! But one thing that did, surprisingly, creep into view was this snow monkey.
They are, perhaps, most famous for living near an onsen (hot spa) which is a few hours drive from where I was in Kamikochi. I was, therefore, surprised when this one sauntered out from the forest and onto the path. It wasn’t tame exactly, more indifferent to the people who were all stopped in their tracks and taking pictures.
It walked along for a little bit and then jumped back into the trees.
Even without more macaque’s there was still plenty to see. The mountains, the autumn foliage ((Marge: Next to Spring and Winter, Fall is my absolute favorite season.
Just look at all this beautiful foilage.
Lisa: It’s not “foilage,” mom, it’s “foliage.” Foo-liage.
Marge: That’s what I said, foilage. It doesn’t take a nucular scientist
to pronounce foilage.
Lisa: [growls])), the greens and reds contrasting with the blue sky. Really beautiful.
By the time I got back to the bus terminal it was pretty much dark. It had remained pretty much fine the whole day. I’m really glad I made it.
This weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Dark,” was easier than some of those that they’ve come up with recently! This was taken from the top of Tokyo Tower last month.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Fluffy.” I’m entry number 187.
If you were to make a list of the foods that I won’t eat and then make a diet that consists almost entirely of them, you’d get pretty close to what I thought the Japanese ate.
As it happens, I was wrong. Or at least, there were plenty of options available for someone who won’t eat fish or pickles. But that’s not to say that there weren’t odd or interesting things.
Most hotels did not include breakfast and, since the trip was turning out to be really expensive, I decided just to pop into a “convenie” and get some bread products. While it’s fair to say that you don’t get a lot of the varieties at home — melon bread, lots of things with custard in the middle — it was the packaging that was most entertaining.
I know that this isn’t supposed to be showing a spanking bear but can you tell me with a straight face that it doesn’t look like that?
Not all Japanese food is funny or weird, though. In a sense, one of the defining qualities of Japanese food, like French food, is the care and attention that goes into it, both in terms of the combination of flavours and in the presentation.
While I was in Matsumoto, there was a large and well attended festival all about soba, a type of noodle. It’s fascinating to see this kind of thing anyway, but it was raining and otherwise miserable, so where else was I going to go of a Saturday morning?
One of the cool things was the demonstrations of how the noodles were made.
They make it look so easy, throwing around the dough and all their neat rolling and cutting, but I’m sure if I tried I’d just end up with an inedible blob of proto-pasta.
Another neat thing is seeing a lot of unusual food. In this case, food before it’s in a state that you would normally eat. These are wasabi plants.
The other bonus of going to a food festival is that there’s always something good to eat. There were two stalls that were especially well attended, with queues passing a good number of other stands. I’m not sure what was so good about them. Standing in line is not my cup of tea even back home.
What I had tasted pretty good to me and there seemed to be no complaints from the locals.