Ten thousand torii gates and Osaka

It’s me again today (Grace). Hugh has been applying for several jobs all day today, so I said I would help him out by writing his blog from yesterday so he can have a break from the computer. Send him good vibes please everyone!

Today is our last day in Kyoto before heading to the town of Kinosaki, where we will be soaking our troubles away in the several ‘onsen’ (hot spa baths). There isn’t much to report from today as we have taken a well earned ‘day of rest’ (apart from job applications…) due to us absolutely doing ourselves in yesterday in the heat.

We set off in the morning on the local train system (which is great by the way! You can use your Japan rail pass on loads of the local trains in Kyoto) for one of the most famous and popular shrines of Fushimi Inari-Taisha. This shrine sits on one of the hills/mountains surrounding Kyoto and as soon as we arrived, we knew it was popular with both the locals and tourists.

The heat yesterday surpassed all other days, and as soon as we got off the train we were both soaked through with sweat (eww), but we marched on, up a busy hill to the main temple.

You may be able to see two foxes at the entrance to the temple – these are also known as ‘inari’ and one of them is holding a key in its mouth. This is the key to the rice granary as the entire complex of shrines here is dedicated to the gods of rice and sake (both very important in Japan!). Once we had seen the bustling main temple, we followed the crowds up a little path, where the most famous aspect of the site began. The area is populated by ten thousand torii gates – all donated by people who have had success thanks to the rice gods. We walked down a tunnel of the gates, which were all marked with the names of their donors.

Fed up of the crowds, we then took a mystery path, which took us deep into the mountain forest and went on a spontaneous trek through bamboo forests and past surprise shrines guarded by inari foxes.

Grace gets silently eaten alive by insects as the fox spirit looks on.

A very, very sweaty hour later we thought it best to return to the station before we ended up as a news headline something along the lines of ‘Couple, equipped with pointless umbrella attempt to scale Japanese mountain in the height of summer’.

Giant bamboo!

a shrine/graveyard?

mossy inari foxes

On our return to the train station we decided to fuel up on rice balls. But Hugh didn’t have any old rice ball. He had the McChicken Sandwich of riceballs! And boy was he pleased with his find!

Due to the insufferable heat and the feeling that we may, at any moment, melt into the ground, we decided to take a little train journey using our Japan rail passes (buy before you travel!) to Osaka, which is only half an hour away from Kyoto.

Osaka seems to be a much more commercial city than Kyoto, and as soon as we arrived, we could see the giant advertisement boards looming over passers by.

WRONG LEG YOU IDIOT

We headed straight for Dotonbori – the area famous for its bustling street life and crazy shop displays, as well as our main reason for visiting Osaka – FOOD! The street didn’t disappoint and my personal favourite street display was the octopus with tako-yaki clasped in its (moving) tenticle. It was pretty easy to work out what sort of food each joint specialised in.

After sourcing some affordable ‘street food’ in the form of some freshly cooked tako-yako (octopus in balls of batter), we decided to call it a day as we were wiped out from the heat and hopped back on the train to Kyoto! But not before taking time to appreciate how Osaka had made their famous food into a cute money-making industry! (By putting a face on it and making it into a keyring, of course).

Rice ball count: 2 (Grace: 1)

NB: We will be writing the next blog post on leaving Kinosaki as we are essentially only there for one full day. See you on the other side!