This Is A Lake - A travel blog

So! Time to travel! I woke up early this morning to bid farewell to Kyoto, say goodbye to Liza and begin the journey to Mt. Koya (or Koya-san in Japanese). Koya is a small sacred town, 820 m high in the mountains, notable for being in essence the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism. I was dreading the journey, in a way, because of all the exchanges you have to make to get from Kyoto to Koya: first you take a shinkansen to Osaka, then the subway to Nanba, then a train to the base of the mountain, then a cable car to Koya, then a bus to wherever it is you're staying. However, it turned out to be much better than it reads on paper. The shinkansen ride to Osaka takes barely 15 minutes, and although the train is the longest part of the journey clocking in at about an hour and a half, the train-cable car-bus combination went as smooth as it gets: although they aren't very frequent, they are timed to coincide with each other so the cable car will be waiting for you when you get of

Today was my last day in Kyoto, so it's been pretty much a day of tying up loose ends. On the one hand, I felt pretty satisfied of having seen the most important landmarks, and on the other, I was a bit tired of temple-hopping (especially as I'm leaving tomorrow to stay at a temple), so I decided that any temples that I have left to see here will have to wait until my next visit. I had a very slow morning, just catching up on some sleep, blogging about yesterday, and so on, and then left for Arashiyama to see the Bamboo Grove. I had been warned that it was a second-tier visit, and it's true; it's waaay too far from the centre to warrant the trip. The bamboos are beautiful, and it does get a bit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at points, but unlike the Philosopher's Path, it doesn't really have anything to spark your interest as you walk along. Riding the train back, I noticed it stopped near Myoshinji, a big temple complex I had heard about, so I got off

Yesterday was Nara day! We headed to Nara from Kyoto first thing in the morning, where we met with Liza's friend, Yoko, who kindly volunteered to show us around. We began in Nara Park, a pleasant, forested park with lots and lots of deer. The deer are smaller than those you might see in the West, and they are so used to people that they have literally no reaction to tourists walking around them, taking their picture or even petting them! They're hilariously cavalier about the whole thing. The park has a beautiful lake, surrounded by cherry trees (so you can imagine what a sight it must be in sakura season) and a big gazebo right in the middle. Afterwards it was already time for lunch, so we went somewhere nearby because Yoko "knows a restaurant". That turned out to be Edo-san , an amazing inn/restaurant that doesn't occupy one building, but a set of small houses, one of which had been accommodated to be our dining room. It was an extraordinary experience,

I went to a Japanese bakery today and found the experience to be very... deceptive. You see, when you walk into a Japanese rice cracker shop, you see rice crackers. That's what they are. But , when you walk into a Japanese bakery, you see Western breads and buns, but that's not what they are at all! I walked down the aisle seeing all this bacon bread and pizza bread, thinking, fair enough, there's that in France too, and then I see this beautiful, soft, golden bun, looking delicious, and I decipher the Japanese tag enough to read -"fish bread"? What? No. No! Fish doesn't go in there! My goal, anyway, was to have melon pan, something that piqued my curiosity back when I gave Yakitate Japan a try (I dropped it because the Japanese was just too difficult to me, but the manga itself is hilarious). It's a regular bun, with a greenish layer of frosting on the top (it looks like frosting, at least, but it's not too sweet), and filled with a very light me

Well, this is better! Today it was still cold, but it was sunny and the sky was clear -it was a pleasure to walk all over Kyoto today, and I did! I started my day with a healthy Kyoto-style breakfast, which includes three different types of tofu (a Kyoto specialty, Liza explained), fish, an assortment of pickles, and rice and miso soup, of course. Seeing all the little cups and dishes arranged so beautifully can be deceiving -I ended up so full! My first stop was Kiyomizu-dera, an impressive temple notable for its wooden deck suspended above a hill; it was assembled, without nails. It has an amazing view of the forest as well as the city of Kyoto itself. After being in the flat, dense urban jungle that is Tokyo for a week, it's refreshing to see hills and mountains. They provide a visual limit to the space you inhabit, and the uneven terrain offers great sightseeing opportunities. Apart from overlooking the forest, there are a number of things to do at Kiyomizu. One is a pi

What happened?! Yesterday was all sunny and warm and wonderful and today was all gray and rainy and cold and windy and marathonian (more on that in a bit). Can we go back? I had a moment of choice paralysis this morning, when I sat down to draft my itinerary for the day and saw all these wonderful sights asking to be explored, spread out all over the city, and virtually no idea of how to better transport myself from one place to another. In the end, though, I thought it better to start from the top and go to Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion. I got myself a One Day Bus/Subway Pass as soon as I left the hotel. I'm sure it saves you money, but really what I wanted was to spare myself having to fish for exact change every time I took a bus. The JR Pass isn't super useful in Kyoto! So I got to Kinkakuji, eventually, and it was gorgeous. My guidebook said you have to visit really early on a weekday to avoid the constant crowd, but this early in the season there were actually ve

Early this morning I left Sawanoya and Tokyo altogether -for good, because I'm not departing from there to get back to France. I was certainly a bit sad to leave Sawanoya, because it was such a nice place to stay, but I was also more than ready to move on. I saw so many different places in Tokyo that I feel satisfied of my visit. I took the shinkansen to Kyoto. As I had been told to expect, travelling by shinkansen is quiet, it's fast, there's lots of room for your legs and your bags, it's scrupulously punctual, it doesn't shake or sway... The only disappointment was to find that I had been given an aisle ticket. Egads! After I arrived in the gigantic Kyoto Station, the hardest part was to make the transfer to the subway -there were literally entire classrooms of children sitting on the hallways. From there, getting to Hotel Sugicho was very straightforward. The place itself looks fairly old, but it's well kept, my room is enormous , and not just by Japanes