Ah, time to start anew yet again! Today the weather would cooperate quite nicely, I’m glad to say.  Which was a good, good thing.

First order of business was getting to Kinkakuji.  Now, a more seasoned traveller might try and navigate the Kyoto City Bus system in a suitably skillful matter and avoid what we did, but I think it worked out simpler, if maybe a bit longer.

We took the JR Sagano line back to Kyoto station, bought two days worth of all-day bus passes, and got on the bus here for Kinkakuji.  It’s unfortunate that Kyoto isn’t as easy to navigate by rail as Tokyo.  The buses were usually crowded, took a long time to get to their destination, and you had to really, really, know what you were doing or you’d be headed in the wrong direction on the wrong bus.  The bus route map will tell you all you need to know, but it can be confusing if you don’t study it.

Anyway, the bus stop at Kinkakuji from Kyoto Station really doesn’t drop you off directly at the Temple.  You have to navigate a bit off the main street to get there.  Not far, but do your homework. (more on this later!)  Just follow the crowd, really.

Kinkakuji, or “The Golden Pavilion” is really a sight to see.  It is a bit underwhelming if you buy into the hype, though.  I mean, its just a gold covered building on the edge of a pond.  But its one of the “Yes, I have been there!” things you must do.  And it is pretty.

Aside: One thing that struck me about Kyoto was the obvious “touristy”-ness of pretty much everything.  Unlike some of the sites in Tokyo, everything here is just covered with fellow sightsee-ers.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  In/around Tokyo, it didn’t seem to be quite as crowded, or quite as, I dunno, blatant.  The parks, temples, etc., just aren’t as crowded, or have more people just doing what they do every day, going for their daily constitutional, hanging out for lunch, etc….  Anyway.

You enter the main “complex” and follow the hordes around a corner and bang, there it is.  There’s a little section to the left where you can get the best pictures across the pond, then you walk around the pond, and wind up behind the temple in a garden of sorts.  At the “end” there’s a (almost more interesting, architecture wise) area of shops and shrines.  I picked up a box of incense here, and my daughter got hooked on sakura-flavor mochi!  The whole thing really doesn’t take very long to go through, and we took our time!

Once back out at the entrance, it was on to Ryoanji, home of the famous Zen rock garden.  Now, I had read (in numerous sources) that if you just walk down the street from here you will wind up at Ryoanji, just stick to “the wall” and you can’t miss it.

Wrong.

We wound up back in a residential area, in a little “nook” in the hills by a university instead.  We could see that we were on the back side of the Kinkakuji complex.  And that wasn’t right.  There weren’t any regular bus stops here, either.  Eventually we gave up trying to get our bearings (there was nobody around to ask either) and retraced our steps to the last major bus stop we found.

Success! On the bus to Ryoanji! On the way, we passed by an absolutely huge and ancient looking temple gate.  Unfortunately the name escapes me right now.  I get the feeling that you’d have to spend a month here to really get a good and proper look at everything.

Ryoanji, like Kinkakuji, is also somewhat underwhelming.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just not what you expect.  I think the crowds of people literally hanging out on the edge of the famous rock garden was a downer.  There were at least three or four rows of people just sitting there, taking it in, I suppose.  But it kind of ruins the effect, if you know what I mean.  The remainder of the building is quite nice, and also the moss garden and pond.  This one would have been really impressive in a couple more weeks, as it was almost exclusively bordered in cherry trees.

Mission accomplished, it turned out to be much later than we would have liked, so it was on back to Kyoto station.  And this is where it really got fun.

At the bus stop we hopped the bus marked “Kyoto Station.”  Ah, but not so, really.  Turns out this one went all the way to the other end of the route, where you had to get off at the depot, and board another bus for Kyoto Station.  That entire trip probably took a good hour at least, but we got to see some of the city from the bus window…..

Back at Kyoto Station, we decided we’d head up the massive stairs (taking the escalator of course) of the Isetan wing, to the food floors for dinner.  Yum!

We opted for a a pseudo-Teppanyaki place, where we enjoyed some Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki and yakisoba….  then it was a quick train ride home.

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