Kobe > Kyoto > Kobe
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.
Trees, mosses and stones were collected from around Japan resulting in wooded grounds covered with a variety of gardens, complete with raked sand, designed by the landscape gardener Soami.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the main building, which is being renovated (the work should be completed by spring 2010), but I was totally blown away from the time we walked through the main entrance, between magnificent high hedges lining both sides of the approach to the temple. Once inside the temple courtyard, the first thing you run across is the Ginshaden (Sea of Silver Sand), where a perfectly smooth cone of sand is supposed to represent Mount Fuji, and from there, following the pathway, you eventually end up looking back over the city of Kyoto.
The notes in my journal read don’t write, just show pictures though I can’t leave the subject without mentioning that I particularly loved the moss. Until that Sunday, if I thought of moss at all (and I rarely did) I regarded it was an odd green substance that you occasionally find growing on rocks in pools and other damp environments, probably rather attractive if you liked that sort of thing, but nothing really to write home about.
After the sight of the very important moss alerted me to the variety of mosses they were actually cultivating to fit into the gardens I emerged with some (probably totally unrealistic) ambitions to incorporate moss into the grounds around the Little House of Concrete.
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.
To be quite honest, I’d more or less had enough by the time we got back to the hotel, located in the downtown business district, which meant dining options in the immediate neighbourhood were few and far between. Instead I opted for a takeaway snack, a couple of beers from a convenient vending machine and the chilled bottle of Steingarten while bringing my travel notes up to date as ‘Er Indoors slipped in and out of the room to monitor the progress of a load of washing.
The Steingarten with its lemon/lime characters on the nose as well as on the palate, provided a wonderful wind-down after what had been a rather wearing, and at times quite chaotic, day.
In fact, several days later I heard ‘Er Indoors use a word that sounded awfully like Kyotic to describe the circumstances, adding a new word to our personal dictionaries.
Kyotic: (adjective) State of utter chaos as experienced in Kyoto on a sunny sakura Sunday.