Heading back downhill we picked up a couple of ice creams and set off along the Philosopher’s Path, a thirty-minute walk downhill beside a creek, with pathways on either bank, a fringe of heritage buildings beside the pathways, various tea shops and art stalls, and a constant flow of people in both directions.
Put that way it doesn’t sound all that fantastic.
But then you add the cherry blossom, which is admittedly the reason most of the people are there, and you’ve got something else entirely.
Eventually, however, the crush got to us and we bailed out before the trail finished, and wandered downhill towards the city centre through quiet streets lined with old-style houses, eventually ending up at a temple which might, as the photos show, have been quite magnificent but we’d had enough of crowds and kept working our way back towards downtown Kyoto, crossing a bridge and diving into alleyways lined with bars, restaurants and assorted dens of iniquity that run parallel to the river. 
Emerging onto one of Kyoto’s major thoroughfares, we stopped in a small tea room for a late lunch (a hamburger plate and tuna cream spaghetti) which was enough, as it turned out, to keep us going for the rest of the day.
Finding our way back to Kawaramachi Station we decided we’d had enough for the time being, boarded a train and managed to find a seat, which was enough to persuade us to travel all the way to Osaka rather than changing trains as we had in the morning, so that we could get onto a Kobe-bound train and be assured of a seat.
It had been that sort of day.
Back in Kobe we decided that we hadn’t quite got the full value out of the three-day Kansai passes, so we took a ride on the Portliner monorail out to Kobe Airport and back, which gave us a mariners’ eye view of the city. Once we’d finished that little pleasure jaunt it was time to organize the next stage of the odyssey.
First up, we had to convert a couple of Japan Rail Pass vouchers into actual tickets, and with that accomplished we were able to book ourselves onto the shinkansen from Kobe to Kyoto and the slower train that would carry us from Kyoto to Kanazawa.