Day 10 - Hotel Switch & Kyoto
We had an early start in the morning as we had to catch the shinkansen to Kyoto at 6:48 from Tokyo Station so we had to get there first. We left the hotel around 6am.
View from the shinkansen
We arrived in Kyoto around 9:47am, and our first task was to find the coin storage lockers so we could get rid of our over backpack and just spend the day carrying around our day backpack and my camera bag.
Fushimi Inari Shrine
We then headed over to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, but just as we arrived it started raining, very heavily. My umbrella was too small for the both of us so my fiancé bought a new one, we then went on the hunt for somewhere to eat lunch while we waited for the rain to stop.
After lunch the rain had stopped and it didn't restart again for the entire day, this meant we had a large umbrella to carry around with us though, but thankfully, pretty much every shop and restaurant in Japan has an umbrella holder at their entrance so you don't carry your wet umbrella around their store and ruin anything. This is something we really should have in England since we get a lot of rain! But I suppose its to do with trust, here you probably couldn't leave your umbrella outside of a shop and then go pick it up when you were finished buying something as it'd probably be long gone by then.
As the rain had stopped we made our way back to the shrine, stopping at a couple of little shops on the way, we picked up a couple of souvenirs and gifts for people before spending a couple of hours exploring the shrine.
We followed the torii gates up to the top of Mount Inari, briefly stopping for a Kirin Lemon on the way up, and then again on the way back down. The area with the small refreshment hut has a wonderful view of the city which you can see below.
View from Mount Inari (not the summit)
As we continued up the mountain from the refreshment hut, we followed a slippery path down and ended up in an area where no one else was visiting. I'm not sure if it meant we weren't supposed to be there or if most people crossed over the car park rather than continuing along the paths. It was an interesting and quiet area, we had a look around for 10 minutes or so before slowly making our way back up the slippery hill to the car park.
We then made our way back to the station and headed over to Arashiyama where we paid a quick visit to the grounds of Tenryu-ji Temple (I don't seem to have taken any photographs on my iPhone 6 and I've not gone through my DSLR photographs yet) before heading over to the bamboo grove.
Arashiyama Bamboo Grove
After visiting Tenryu-ji Temple we took a walk through the bamboo groves, please ignore how bad the photographs are, the sun was starting to get low and the groves were getting pretty dark. I definitely recommend a visit to the Bamboo Groves if you're in Kyoto and already visiting Tenryu-ji Temple, but I don't think its worth a stand alone visit, after the first few minutes of walking through it it just gets pretty repetitive. Its interesting to look at but if you're low on time its something you can probably skip easily. You're better off visiting Kinkaku-ji or Ginkaku-ji, sadly, we didn't have enough time to visit either of those because of the rain and we spent a lot longer at Fushimi Inari Taisha than we thought we would. It was definitely my favourite shrine of the entire trip.
After that we didn't have a lot of time left so we headed back over to Kyoto Station to pick up our backpack and get something to eat before taking the Shinkansen over to Hiroshima and checking into the Granvia Hiroshima Hotel which is located inside of Hiroshima Station.
Here is my video from Fushimi Inari Taisha and the Bamboo Grove
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