View from our window: Gimmond Hotel, Kyoto. 7:40 am, 22 October 2013
The Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji). The beautiful grounds at Ginkakuji had the first raked gravel garden we’ve seen, and boy, it’s a doozy. The cone-with-the-top-chopped-off (a conical frustrum, the internet informs me) is around five feet high, and the main bed of gravel is about a foot deep.
Pontocho, one of the main streets in what used to be Kyoto’s red light district. Not very racey these days, but it’s a very pretty narrow alleyway crammed with restaurants, teahouses and bars.
Chion-in in central Kyoto. Disappointingly, the main hall is shrouded for restoration work until 2019, but there are some lovely views of the city.
We discovered there was a Michelin-starred restaurant in a back alley about 300m from our hotel in Osaka. The basic setup: after a few starters, they brought us different deep fried bites of deliciousness until we finally (reluctantly) told them we could eat no more. Then they brought us cold udon noodles for dessert.
View from our window: Hotel Floral Inn Namba, Osaka. 8:50 am, 20 October 2013.
There are beer vending machines in the streets. No noticeable markup either.
It was a rainy old day when we woke up in Koyasan, but we wandered around the Danjo Garan Complex nonetheless. The complex is designed as a “quiet and secluded place” for training Buddhist monks. So it’s like a Buddhist university campus, made up of loads of giant wooden temples, with chants emanating from the odd one or two, and some sodden tourists strolling by.
View from our window: Saizen-in Temple, Koyasan. 6:50 am, 19 October 2013
In Koyasan, the done thing is to stay in shukubo, or temple lodgings. We stayed in one called Saizen-in and enjoyed a Shojin Ryori dinner (Buddhist vegetarian meal). There were many different kinds of tofu, most of them delicious. Our room itself was actually three separate rooms, separated by sliding doors — a sitting room, a dining room, and a sleeping room.