As usual, I am a big liar. I found this photo in my inbox after writing the last post.

This is my and my archnemesis locking in mortal combat.

Or Nik and I playing with glow sticks at the Robot Restaurant…:D

We trained about an hour and a bit out of Kyoto to get into the town of Nara, in the Nara prefecture. The plan was to rent bicycles and ride around. I had the thought that this would be more similar to our walking around the countryside trip, but Nara was a decently sized town with a lot of people and buildings and such.

If you open the above picture and zoom in the middle, there’s a turtle sunning on that log.

There was a ton of deer in the area, and a vendor selling deer treats for 150 yen. Sean bought some, and became the best deer friend.

ALL THE DEER.

BEST DEER FRIEND. 😛

A little Buddhist temple.

I was really bummed out about this part. This sign is for a shop that specialized in cat souvenirs. They had lucky cat statues and cat plates and mugs and it was all cat all the time. We were really hungry when we passed it, and food was getting hard to find because restaurants close from 2 (to 3) until 5pm most days. I wanted to go back, so I made plans with the guys to meet up again shortly after food. I ran back…and then remembered I didn’t have any cash on me. He didn’t take VISA, but he directed me to an ATM…which wouldn’t give me any money. It was a lot of effort and back and forth, but I had to give up. Cat stuff!

Outside of town, biking through a park area. This was getting on in the day, and we were meeting Sean nearby who had texted us to say that the shrine he was at was closed.

While Sean was sitting there, it turned out that he’d had the thought to change our plans. When we arrived, he suggested that we might skip out on the last night in Kyoto and go to Tokyo instead. In the middle of this field, he’d been on AirBNB, had contacted a potential home and had talked with the owner! Nik and I thought this was a fine idea (we were done touring Kyoto) so we made it happen.

This photo is after Nik has lifted my backpack and not at all gently dropped it forwards. Onto my camera. >.> My stuff was fine, but we wanted evidence that he was actually sorry. 😛

These are the last of my photos!

April 17th we thought the weather would be more rain, but it turned out ok. We trained north to Nagoya and then walked around Nagano for 2 hours. It was very cold in Nagano! That night we went out for dinner and drinks and ended up drinking with our host, who was… well, he was originally from Nebraska. He’s a gay Japanese TV personality. Apparently his spot is a travel spot on how to ask for things in other countries, so how to say “I would like a taxi”, explaining that English to Japanese travelers. His Japanese was amazing!

April 18th we had that breakfast I wrote about, and then walked around a lot buying souvenirs for our friends and family back home! 10pm we got on the plane. Traditionally, I haven’t been able to sleep on planes, so the fact that we were leaving so late and getting home 3pm PST was really worrying. I did manage to sleep for about 5 hours off and on, which I think was really helpful for surviving the weekend!

Last night, had some NyQuil as I’m feeling pretty sick, which helped me sleep through the night, although I woke up around 7am anyway. Now onto getting over the sick and the jet lag!

I’ve got one more post, my traditional “Lessons Learned” post, which I’ll get to shortly before signing off on this vacation!

I’m at home now, and it’s 730am and I’m sick and tired and I have a cat sitting on me. My goal is to upload the rest of my photos today so they are off my list of things to do…hopefully the trip reporting is still ok.

After leaving that other temple, we decided we wanted to try to get to Mt. Inari for the sunset. The sun was going down faster than we could walk, so we caught a cab to the base of the mountain. We quickly hoofed it up…

There are more Shinto gates on this hike than in the rest of the country combined…(not a real statistic).

About a quarter of the way up the mountain we celebrated and stopped to take some photos. The sun was going down on the other side of a hill that was in our way, so we quickly took our photos and then continued our hike, not realizing exactly how long we had to do it in.

Nearer the top, there are tons of these gates surrounding little mini shrines, most of them with fox statues like this.

Sean was under the impression that there were so many gates that he could really just walk away with one… (he put it back…).

It was super dark by the time we got to the top of the mountain. But “top” was a bit of a misnomer anyway, as there was no view at the top. We’re pretty certain that there was a closed stored that you could walk through if it was the day, in order to see the view, but at that time of night we had nothing.  The hike was still super worthwhile though, I really enjoyed hiking the mountain and seeing all the things.

Back at the mid-way point was the only view on the hike. This is a photo of Kyoto from that vantage point.

There was a lot of stray/wild cats on this hike. This one was being pet when we came across him.

We stopped at a lake in the middle of the mountain, and Nik and Sean wanted to try to get some photos of it. It’s pitch black to our eyes at this point, so while they are unable to get any photos I show off the latest technology. 25,600 ISO is grainy as any grain you can imagine, but it does produce a photo that looks like daylight! 😛

A more reasonable photo, getting a bit of atmosphere into it.

The giant gate at the bottom of the hike.

This is one place I’d go back to, if only to see what it’s like during the day! There were a bunch of dirt trails that we couldn’t explore because they weren’t lit after dark, and a lot of buildings that were closed.

We took the subway back to our place in Kyoto and passed out, after a long day of walking.

Ichiran in Tokyo. Forms to fill out for your order, and little privacy booths. And a spigot of water.

I have a number of day posts to put up, but the Wi-Fi isn’t great and I was tired last night. I’ll get to them before I post a “lessons learned” post!

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This day started off not horrible, but got super super rainy just before we got to the shrine. Like, gonna drown kind of rain. The guys had umbrellas, but I eschew such nonsense…until I’m going to drown, at which point I huddle under the nearest umbrella like it’s going to rain until the end of days.

Lots of graves on this walk.

Afterwards we discovered that Nik had waypointed us towards the wrong shrine. He thought it was super close. It wasn’t, so this was a really long walking day. That’s ok, because both of the place we saw this day were super cool.

Nik says this thing is too orange. He’s watched Amadeus recently, so I quoted “too many notes” at him.

There was a huge parade of girls in kimonos at this shrine. We later found out that there is a rental place down the hill. Absolutely beautiful colours!

Sean asked, in Japanese, if we could take this girls photo. (unlike the above photo, which was not taken with permission…). She responded that she was Thai! Goes to show you that if you wear a kimono in Japan, you’re gonna get Japanese spoken at you.

The shrine across the way.

The way…from the shrine across the way. As in, we walked to that orange thing in the distance and took a photo across the gorge. 🙂

As I think noted way back when, I’ve really gotten into the cleansing. It’s nice. It’s a simple ritual, and I feel slightly more peaceful afterwards. So I couldn’t pass up the chance to get into Cleansing Xtreme Edition!

There was a line up…

Just some random garden photos.

After the shrine, we walked the other direction away from it. There is a street with a ton of tourist things on it. I like this photo of Nik in the street!

After we left this place, we walked for a bit to try to find a good place to see the sunset. We had a plan to get to another big shrine area that I’d been really wanting to see. I was a bit annoyed that we were hitting it near sundown, but we really made up for it! (as you’ll see in part 3!) We ended up catching a cab to the next place because we thought it would help made sunset…it didn’t, but that was ok.

I spent most of this evening babysitting the last post, so I’m really hoping that this one uploads all the photos successfully while I sleep! Good night, Pacific Standard Time! 🙂

We decided to walk from our place to two significant temples that were within walking distance. On our way, we stopped a few times.

This place photo is from right outside our apartment, I can see this from the balcony.

This next one is a big Buddhist temple nearby.

Kyoto station is impressive.

A garden.

And another temple.

Then, we get into a lot of photos because the next two places were super impressive.

It was nice during this part of the walk, but had been threatening to rain all day.

It was super raining when we leave Arima Onsen, so we planned to sit on the train and watch the world go by on this day. Some really great villages and mountains and rivers on the train from Arima to Fukuchiyama!

Again we had some free time while traveling, so we stopped in Fukuchiyama because we saw a castle while on the train. It was closed, so we just wandered the grounds for a bit.

We got to Osaka and the place wasn’t the greatest. Smelled bad, some trouble with the door and we couldn’t figure out the wifi password. It worked in the end, the smell cleared up and we obviously opened the door, but it was annoying. A really cheap and decent restaurant around the corner, then back home for some drinking and Star Realms. 🙂

Only two photos here, because hot springs are hot and wet and my tough camera battery was dead the one time I remembered it.

This was a really nice place. We were instructed to wear the outfits provided while wandering around the resort, and even in town. I saw people wearing things like these in town, but we elected not to.

“Nice” does not equal “big” this was our sleeping arrangements and living room while we stayed here. Just the one night.

The hot springs themselves were really great. Public and private ones you could book, really nice and hot and relaxing. There was a public shower area where you sat and cleaned yourself, and I felt like I could just sit and scrub for as long as I wanted. I love taking a shower, but often feel rushed – I have to go somewhere most times – so it was nice to be able to sit and do the work.

We went to the hot springs 4 times over the hours we were there, and left around 11am the next morning. To a lot, a lot, of rain.

(Programming note: it’s April 15th as I post these, and it may be slow going from here. The wifi is suuuuuper slow to upload photos, and we take it with us when we go walking so big posts take a long while to load. I’ll get it all, just maybe not before I get home!)

We had some time to kill after leaving Osaka, before arriving at Arima Onsen. We got on a train with the intention of getting off randomly to visit places that looked neat from the train car. We arrived at Osaka station and saw this building off in the distance.

We put our rolly bags into a temporary storage locker and started walking. Japan is filled with crazy looking buildings like this one, but we were told that this was the “Floating Garden” and we wanted to see it.

The escalator going up that you see in those cross-beams in the photos above.

A view down of the same escalator.

The view from the top.

We were lied to. There was no garden, floating or otherwise, in the building. Cool building and cool view though!