Sunday, 6 April 2008
Reflecting on the previous days adventures, and bearing in mind this was the only hotel where we were booked in for two nights I decided to lighten the load in the backpack and place the bottle of Steingarten in the fridge before we shut the door and set off for Sannomiya en route to Kyoto where, on a sunny sakura season Sunday one could go, or so I was informed, to look at the people.
Even after the Himeji episode I didn’t appreciate just how many people were likely to be involved.
Prior experience also suggested breakfast might well be a good idea so once we’d reached the station complex we found a suitable eatery and placed our orders. I’d thought that a hot dog might be a suitably non-controversial offering and was mildly bemused when it arrived accompanied by a side salad and a daub of mashed potato.
By the way, it’s surprising how often mashed potato turned up over the next twelve days.
We managed to snare seats on the train out of Sannomiya, but since we had to change trains en route, and the second train had presumably been packed to the gunwhales when it departed from Osaka, we were forced to stand for the second leg of the trip.
Once we’d arrived, ‘Er Indoors confided that her knowledge of the local geography left something to be desired and that we needed a map, resulting in a search for an information that seemed to take an hour and involved enough changes of direction to leave me completely disoriented, even if I’d known where we’d started from.
Which, of course, I didn’t.
Once we’d succeeded in obtaining a map we wandered out in search of a bus, only to be confronted with about a dozen queues meandering away from a dozen embarkation points where buses appeared, in what seemed totally random order, from time to time.
We attached ourselves to the end of what we thought was the right queue (it wasn’t) and settled down for a lengthy wait. Close by another group of obvious out-of-towners managed to attract the attention of one of the assorted officials wandering around the area, and, while I had no idea what the ensuing conversation was about it was enough to prompt ‘Er indoors to ask a couple of questions which resulted in us heading towards a completely different location where we would, I gathered, find a more appropriate and marginally less crowded alternative which would deliver us to a point close to our primary objectives, Ginkakuji Temple and the Philosopher’s Path.
The bus delivered us to the foot of the road leading uphill towards Ginkakuji Temple (also one end of the Philosopher’s Path) and we joined the throng heading uphill.
Ginkakuji, the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, at the foot of the mountains east of Kyoto was built in the 15th century as a place of rest and solitude for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, and the main building was intended to match his grandfather’s Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion), but plans to cover the structure in silver were delayed by the Ōnin War, which ravaged Kyoto, and abandoned altogether after Yoshimasa's death in 1490, and the villa was converted into a Zen temple.