Figjam's Epic Adventure 'The Second Coming': Nara Pt. 2 & First Time In Kyoto! Love Temples.

18/09/12

After I had visited Nara Dreamland, as you can imagine I was starving, so I walked down town pretty quickly and headed into a local restaurant and ordered a small beef bowl for breakfast! I practically drank this down and then headed up the hill to go and check out some temples!

It was great fun exploring the temples first thing in the morning, because no one was around! I had the place to myself!

The only problem was, was the rain! It was just raining the whole day, and didn’t let up! I tried for a while to remain dry, but it was inevitable! After about an hour in the rain mixed with the humidity I was drenched all the way through! Socks, T-Shirt everything in my bag was wet as well… which wasn’t ideal as my camera and iphone was in my bag. Once you get that wet, I suppose the rain stops being annoying and you end up just accepting it! It kind of gave Nara a type of calmness… its weird but true!

The big highlight in Nara was seeing the biggest Buddha in Japan at the Yakushiji Temple. It was pretty expensive to visit 300YEN ($5AUD) but very, very worth it! I just sat looking at this massive Buddha in recapping about what happened the night before in Dreamland and in awe of how big it is, I was studying all the different details of it as well, it was just amazing!

After this I headed back to the train station in the pouring rain so I could catch a train to Kyoto to explore the many temples here. As soon as I got on the train, I passed out and only woke up when I realise the train wasn’t moving anymore, being tired wasn’t an understatement.

I jumped off the train and snuck through the barriers to avoid paying the ridiculous price that Japan want, to ride their basic train service, and headed to the local Information centre for a map.

My plan was to walk from the station to the Shrine of Inari that is known for its beautiful orange gates that lead up to a shrine at the top of the mountain.

So I’m dripping wet and hiking up to the top, stair after stair can be quite boring, but not when your surrounded by these beautiful Orange shrine gates, its just stunning.

On my hike up, I meet this Aussie guy about my age and we continue to hike together its cool fun to have someone to hike with we explored all around the mountain but we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because we never made it to the top, instead we went a different way down and stumbled upon this amazing Japanese garden. It was my first Japanese garden, it was beautiful. This Australian guy is a studying architect and he was explaining to me how the Japanese set up their gardens. He was saying with a Japanese Garden you walk around the garden until you reach a certain position where everything just fits and it provides you with a beautiful view of the garden… I think they call it Zen. Anyway, this point of the garden was on the bridge, have a look at the photos to see what I mean.

After we explored all the gardens we said our good bye’s and I headed on back to Osaka to pass out on Jack’s (my couchsurfing host) floor… it only took 2 minutes for me to be fast asleep. Which was a good thing, as the next day I was spending an entire day in Kyoto!