Busy Peace

Yesteray was a little slower paced than we have been, tiredness an a touch of illness from the travel starting to take their toll a little, but we still wanted to do something, so we went to arashiyama.

Arashiyama however is accross town from our hotel, so we walked down the street a little and picked up a local train. Now, when I say train, we weren’t entirely sure how to classify this one. It had full size proper stations like a train, but its track rolled through the road like a tram in places and would drop people in the middle of the road… maybe I’m not used to too many trams? That aside, it was clearly a train locals use a lot too, and I can see why, at 220 yen flat fee to go anywhere on the line it can get quite efficient, especially if you were moving the whole length of the line like we were.

The biggest thing we noticed getting off the train was the crowd, with it being a Sunday, and a particularly famous area there were tonnes of people. While this surprised me a little (it shouldn’t, but there you go) we were glad it wasn’t high season or it could have been a lot worse. All the photos I have look quite peaceful, but they’re a bit sneaky, all well timed or well framed. Like any other forest the bamboo dampened the sound of the masses, but there was no getting away from them really.

On our way through though the forest we found a little Shinto shrine, and then what seemed to be the main attraction for the area, Tenryu-ji. Much like the imperial palace the archiatecture and gardens were stunning, and still busy despite the 500 yen entry fee for the gardens. Happy that we had seen what we wanted to we made our way further through the forest to a station for the ‘romantic’ railway where we paused momentarily before taking a meander through the back streets back to the station.

That evening we went for a stroll down some historic streets in Gion, to soak up some atmosphere, and possibly catch a glimpse of the colourful kimono of a geisha moving between appointments. While there were people about, it wasn’t crowded and it did feel like you had stepped back in time with all the buildings being kept in an older design. The one in the photograph above taking my intrest in particular as it had its own bridge across the river.