Fortunately, the old monks who set about establishing these temples were careful to locate them where visitors would need to make a bit of effort and whoever founded Jingo-ji must have liked his peace and quiet because he positioned the place at the top of a series of fairly steep climbs.
The first one was enough to sort out the sheep from the mountain goats and would, I thought around the halfway point, be enough to deter most of the Kozan-ji chatterers. Those that weren't put off by the incline would be having issues with breathlessness by the time they made it to the top of that particular climb.
The top of that climb featured a little eatery affair where sightseers could stop for refreshment, and there was another fairly steep set of steps thereafter, with refreshment stops thoughtfully provided along the way, before a sharp turn revealed another set of steps that needed to be negotiated.
Sore feet and straining leg muscles are likely to kick in with a vengeance in such circumstances, but a combination of Zen and the art of walking and an absorption with the mechanics of the stride pattern kept those issues in the background.
Along the way I passed a TV camera crew filming an elderly woman in a yellow top and black tights and a much younger female making their way up the final incline to the temple complex.
This, subsequent questioning revealed once The Photographer had caught up (I was comfortably ahead of the camera crew by this stage since they were doing reruns of particular bits of uphill walks from different angles) was a significant Japanese actress from the generation before mine making a filmgrimage around the best spots in the country for coloured leaves on one of those holiday shows.
That means there's a possibility, albeit a very slight one, of a black capped hairy foreigner, head down in Zen and the art of monitoring your stride pattern mode passing the said filmgrimage on the way up appearing on Japanese network TV, with the equally absurd proposition of a sighting as he cowers in a nook beside the ticket booth waiting for his native-speaking accomplice to catch up.
Actually, from there I must admit the presence of the crew did a bit to dampen my enthusiasm as I tried to work things so I stayed out of shot. Once we'd paid our admission fee, I worked around where they were working, passing a couple of impressively weather beaten structures before I found myself at the foot of yet another set of steps leading up to the Kondo, which houses an image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of Healing.