This is comprised of a large 11 metre Buddha statue with 500 5ft tall statues of Kannon either side of it . These are covered in gold leaf and have multiple hands holding various tools to assist mortals in different ways. In front of these are 28 deities, some taken from Indian mythology. The 1000 plus figures are housed under cover in a huge wooden building - which itself is hundreds of years old. It truly is an impressive sight.
From there we walked to Kyoto railway station to catch a train for a short hop south. The station is ultra modern and covers a huge area. Opposite is Kyoto Tower, which you can ride to the top for a view of the city.
We had a 5 minute journey and arrived at our next stop of the day, Inari. The attraction here is Fushimi Inari Shrine. It is not so much the actual shrine that people come to see, but the tori gates lining the hillside one after another. They form a red tunnel as they lure you up the hill and actually stretch for about 4.8 kilometres and number in the thousand. In the light they are a great spectacle.
After a short visit we headed off again to Kyoto station and after seeing the shops are now decorated for Christmas(!!!), we caught a bus for a 45 minute cross city journey. This took us to Ryoanji Temple - better known as the Golden Temple.
This is a must see sight in Japan, so was quite busy. The pavilion of the temple sits beside a lake and is, as the name suggests, golden in colour. With the light shining on it and with the reflection in the water it really is a magnificent sight. As you move around the path of the lake you get different views and the pavilion changes colour as it loses its light. The gardens around the lake are also very nice, but the pavilion steals the show.
We still had time to fit in another bus journey and another temple complex. This time we were really going for the garden, but arrived too late to fully enjoy it as it closed within 30 minutes of our arrival. However, we did get to see a lovely bride in her orange wedding outfit posing for her wedding photographs. She looked stunning set against the red of the temple woodwork.
Another bus journey took us back to our hotel area, but we had time for a quick Mos Burger - (Japanese McDonald's) and a prawn burger, and to see some of the local fashion sights, before returning to our hotel to freshen up and finish our sake!
We then headed out for a stroll along the alleyways of Ponto-Cho, the night life district, hunting for somewhere to have dinner.The alleyways are very narrow and lined with many different eateries. In the end we settled for a very local place and had some excellent dumplings and stir fried rice, followed by a red bean ice cream as we walked back to the hotel!
Tomorrow we leave Kyoto and head back by 'Bullet Train' to Tokyo. We are staying in a very busy district this time so it will be interesting to see the difference from our gentle introduction almost two weeks ago now.
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