Hello there! I’ve had a small hiatus of two weeks due to my broken hard disk as I told about before. I have been scanning every last byte of my computer and my families computer for photos. So I was searching and searching because without photos this would be a boring blog right? And I have found back a fair amount of them, but sadly I lost a lot of photos because my back up of them also got lost. Most of the lost photos are from my solo travels, which also means my Japan photos. Luckily there is social media where I had stored my most important photos so I can keep blogging and showing you about my travels, that’s a positive thing in this whole affair. It is only a fragment of what I could show (and the quality of the photos is also downgraded a lot from the originals), but something is better than nothing I’d say!

So I’ll continue writing about my trip to Japan for now. We checked out of our cosy budget hotel to spend one night a more luxurious yet homely ryokan. This ryokan was run by an old lady and her husband and they took great care of us. It was almost like doing a home stay but with the privacy of a hotel. The ryokan was located in a traditional house with a gorgeous garden (but I forgot to take a picture of that, oh my!) and a small spa bath. But it was still too early to check in so we left our luggage there and rented bicycles at the same place as the day before. The guy from the rental place recognized us and gave us a discount, nice! And today we visited probably the most famous place in Japan; the Golden Pavilion, Kikakuji. It was quite a long journey all the way to the north-east of Kyoto, but enjoyable nonetheless. As I said before, Dutchies on bicycles is like fish in the sea haha.
And lucky for us it wasn’t very crowded at all, so we could take our time and enjoy the reflection of the golden building in the big lake in all rest. It was a time to let the beauty sink in and become at peace. I can tell all about it, but photos beat my words.

Next is a place that is famous with enthousiast of Zen gardens, the Ryoanji temple. The place is known for the dry landscape solely made of pebble stones with a few big stones. Those big stones can not be viewed all at once; no matter where you stand, there will always be at least once out of sight. I think the surroundings were more impressive though. Because the garden is part of a small temple which is part of an even bigger garden. There was a big lake where I spotted cute turtles. And around the temple was a little bit of vegetation and decorations including a gorgeous wishing well. It was interesting seeing the dry landscape and this time I consciously sat down to only look at the garden and clear my thoughts. When you’re at a zen garden why not try becoming zen for a while, right? Until now the gorgeous gardens and temples had awed me and made me both amazed and calm. But this time I made a conscious effort to slow down and appreciate what I saw because a pile of stones doesn’t really give that wow-feeling sat first sight.

Turtles!

We continued our journey a bit more southward to Ninna-ji. It is part of the UNESCO Historic Monuments of Kyoto, just like the Golden Pavilion and Ryoan-ji we saw earlier that day. Taking that into consideration and seeing some photos online, plus the fact that it is close to Ryoanji, I decided to put this on my list of locations to visit for Kyoto. This is once again a massive place with several buildings and gardens on its grounds. We didn’t want to pay to enter every part of Ninna-ji, so we only entered the first part called goten, former residence of the head priest. You can walk around the hallways and look into the rooms. The interesting part is that the hallways are in the open air, so that outside and inside are connected to each other. This concept overflows in the garden which is also connected to the buildings and hallways. The garden is gorgeous and the harmony of outdoors and indoors is something really inspiring, especially for those interested in architecture (me!).

View when walking through the hallways

Not far away from there is Myoshin-ji. This is yet again a place with extended grounds, but what makes this place unique is that it is not located in the mountains but in a residential area so that temples and housed are kind of mixed together and that you will say locals walking around there. And visiting the grounds is free and you can ride around with your bicycle. So there we were, taking a ride with temples to our left and right. There was something really special about this place and just riding with our bicycle there that it’s got a special place in my heart. By the way, we might have done something illegal by bicycling there, so if you go there by bike keep an eye out for any signs that say it’s not allowed ! I didn’t take many photos here, and those I did take got lost, sadly.

After nomming away a delicious ice-cream we headed back early because we we exhausted after the concert of the night before and bicycling and walking all day. The guy of the rental bikes was surprised that we came back so ‘fast’. He couldn’t believe we went all the way to Kinkakuji by bike and visited several places there and biked all the way back before it was evening. What can I say, we are just super fast bikers ! Or to be fair, we are just good planners, fairly good bikers and efficient sightseers I guess haha. When we arrived at our room there was some warm tea, cold refreshing water and wagashi waiting for us, awesome. And they already put our luggage there for us. That is the kind of service I would always like. We reserved the family bath for eight o’clock. We had our own bathroom but the communal bath room has an onsen-like ofuro, which is basically an at home hot spring. So after washing ourselves we soaked in the hot water of the ofuro and slowly felt our fatigue and pains leave our bodies. It is such an relaxing experience. And this was a great alternative for visiting an onsen because it meant having the relaxation without being naked in front of strangers.

Notes;

• Kinkakuji is the most famous sight of Japan. Who doesn’t want to see the mesmerizing Golden Pavilion?
• June is a great time for visiting Japan if you like to avoid too many tourists and want to visit famous places in a relative quiet atmosphere. You should be aware that it is rainy season at that time, but you could be lucky like us and only have two days of rain and many dry days (with grey skies).
• Zen garden equals Ryoan-ji ; go here for the epitome of dry landscape gardens
• Like Japanese architecture and Japanese gardens? Visit Ninna-ji, more particularly the goten part of it.
• Myoshin-ji is great if you like something different and a more residential atmosphere of temples. And it’s free to explore !
• Visiting a hot spring (onsen) is something you can’t miss in Japan. Pamper yourself and relax!
• If you don’t like to be naked in front of strangers, there are some onsen where you can rent a private bath. Or you can go to a hotel where there is an onsen bath included in your room or where you can rent a bath in the hotel.
• Japanese sweets are called wagashi. They aren’t really sweet like Western sweets but very pretty. If you’re staying at a nice ryokan there’s a chance you will get some wagashi in your room.

Originally my friend and I had planned to take it easy this day and visit different temples by bike. But we messed up the date of our concert so it turned out it was taking place on this day. This meant that we had to go to Osaka in the afternoon and visit all the places we wanted before then. The route we planned out was to start at Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion) and go through the Philosophers’ Walk and Nanzen-ji to end at Kiyomizu-dera.We rented some bicycles in a shop a few streets away from our hotel. On our way to Ginkakuji we had to go uphill first. As Dutch people we are very used to use the bike and felt in our element, because what they say about Dutch people is true; we ride the bike a lot and there are bicycles everywhere. The only problem was the (seeming) lack of rules for bicyclers in Japan and lack of bicycle paths. Most of the time we just rode on the pavement and sometimes on the road. There were a few bicycles paths though. Another problem for us was the humidity and heat, but that was a factor during our whole trip.

So from the bike shop we started cycling towards the Kamo river and made our  way to the North alongside the river which was really relaxing. For some reason walking or biking alongside rivers or the seaside equals vacation in my head so I finally had a feeling of being on vacation at that moment. The rest of the trip was vacation too of course, but sometimes it didn’t feel that way with our full schedules and being in the big cities most of the time. I grew up in a small city at the seaside and always went to the beach in the summer and even on vacations abroad with family we would usually go to the beach or a lake and just relax. So that’s what vacation is like for me, being near the water. Big cities will never really make me feel that way. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy my trips to big cities or places far away from the sea. On the contrary. It is so different from what I’m used to that I almost want to see and do too much in a short amount of time and usually wear myself out, thus not getting the feeling of a ‘vacation’ but more of an ‘exploration’.

There were a lot of people strolling along the river and some other bicyclers too. Some people were fishing and others just sitting and enjoying the view.
Next time that I visit Kyoto I will definitely rent a bicycle again to ride along the Kamo river again and take more time for it. And maybe prepare a picknick too!
After a while we left the river behind to make our way up the hills towards the Silver Pavilion.
We had to search our way through a residential area but we found the pavilion pretty quickly. The entrance tickets for the Silver Pavilion are gorgeous by the way; it is a big piece of paper with gorgeous calligraphy and red stamps.

The pavilion itself is a nice piece of architecture. Sadly it is not covered in silver like the name suggests. Because of delays of the construction during the Onin War it just never happened. But the most impressive part of the pavilion is definitely the garden. When you enter there is a small stroke of  rock/sand zen garden, the rest of the garden is covered with lush green trees and flowers. I think it is the most beautiful Japanese garden we encountered during the trip. I can tell all about it, but I think the pictures will speak for themselves.

When we finished a little photo shoot of the garden of Ginkakuji we continued our trip on the bicycle in the hills of west Kyoto. The Philosophers’ Path is near Ginkakuji and I saw some nice photos of it and read about it in a guidebook or online, I can’t really remember. We tried to find it but got lost and decided to just make our way to Nanzen-ji. We then encountered the Philosophers’ Walk by chance, but weren’t aware of it until after a while. I thought it would be a nice path between trees and a small river, which it was, but the canal, not river, was dry and there was a road next to it where we were riding, so it wasn’t as ideal as I had pictured it. And the path itself was closed off. So it isn’t really worth going all the way there to see it, I don’t know why people actually recommend seeing it except when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.

Nanzen-ji took a bit of searching before we could find it. It is in a big ‘park’ with other temples (sub temples I guess). It was nice walking around the park and taking photos of the temples, gates and a such. But honestly, we had no idea which one was Nanzen-ji itself. And we didn’t have the time nor need to pay to visits the actual temple grounds, so we just stayed in the park for a short while for some photos and then continued to our final destination; Kiyomizu. That was quite far away and Kiyomizu is high up in the hills so we were getting tired by then. After a while we saw a pagode peeping above the roofs of houses on steep hills and figured that had to be Kiyomizu-dera. The streets around Kiyomizu are quaint little streets with traditional shops and houses, but they are very steep and very busy so we walked the last part with our bicycles at hand.

Cute bird decorations on a fence

Kiyomizu is famous for the wooden balcony and the three water streams. Apparently, the veranda is build out of wooden pillars without using a single nail. With the amount of people that stand on the structure every day that amazes me! From the balcony you have a nice view of the lush hills behind the temple. At this time of the year, June, they were bright green. From the other platform you can see Kyoto city far below. You are up quite high here! Making our way down, the temple is built on different nights of the hills, we could some a little bit more of the nature and small statues with red clothes on. They are statues devoted for miss carriages, children who died and abortions. It is a little bit sad, but I think the clothes the statues wear are cute at least. Once your down it is time to drink from the famous water streams. One stands for wisdom, the other for a long life and another for health. You can only chose to two of the three, otherwise you are too greedy. There is usually a long line to be able to drink from the streams, but we were lucky and the line was really short when we arrived. There is no indication of which stream is which and actually you only drink from one of them, at least that was the case for us, but it’s the thought that counts. I have to say, the water was delicious and refreshing. Did you know that you can even buy a bottle of Kiyomizu water?

We had a little bit of time left so we browsed some of the shops near Kiyomizu before bringing back the bicycles and refreshing ourself for the concert. And then we once again went to Osaka. The metro to Osaka Dome was so busy that this time we were sure that the concert was today 😉 The concert we were attending was the ‘Seoul Osaka Music of Heart 2011 Fighting Japan’. It was a concert with many different Korean artist to raise money for the victims of the disasters of March 2011. We were barely there or a TV crew came to us and asked us to leave a message for 2PM. We were so taken aback by the sudden approach that we didn’t really know what to say. By then we were still not used to the attention for us in Japan. There were different stands where you could buy merchandise. Weirdly enough, a lot of stands were missing. We bought something at the 2NE1 and B2ST stands, but 2PM, MBLAQ and many more didn’t have a stand. After buying the merchandise we began searching our seats. And man, the arena was huge! So it wasn’t an easy task. When we finally found out seats we discovered that they were very far away from the stage. Normally this wouldn’t be a big problem but with an arena this size the artists looked like ants somewhere far away. Very disappointing. Luckily there were big screens and the atmosphere was great and hearing the songs (sort of) live was also really nice. On the screens they would play these really cool introductions of the bands and they also displayed cool backgrounds that changed for each songs. And there was even fireworks, fire and glitter bombs, or whatever you call them.

The artist that played were:

• MBLAQ
• 4MINUTE
• T-ARA
• BEAST
• U-KISS
• F.T.ISLAND
• IU
• F(X)
• 2NE1
• 2PM
• TVXQ