Kyoto; Sunday, 13 April, 2025

Having had an early night, and with my body still not knowing what time zone it was in, I was awake a little after 5am, which was still 90 minutes too early for breakfast, so lay in bed for a little while reading, and planning out the day, before having a shower and then heading down for breakfast a little before 7. Given breakfast had started at 6:30 this turned out to be a bad idea as it looked like everyone else had come down as soon as breakfast had opened and used every piece of cutlery, crockery, glassware and consumed all the food. In the end it took about 20 minutes of waiting for things to be replenished to get a reasonable breakfast and even then it required using chopsticks, which aren’t the easiest for cold cuts and cheese.

Breakfast consumed I headed out of the hotel just after 8:30 to wander back round to Nijo castle, arriving a few minutes after the complex had opened for the day, but thankfully late enough for the ticket queue to be down to just a handful of people. As it would turn out I’d timed it perfectly between two mass waves of tourist visits with the early tours already rapidly going round the site and the mid-morning tours only arriving as I was leaving.

The previous evening it was only possible to look around the outside of the castle, but during the day you can also access the inside to two palaces, the Ninomaru Goten Palace which was the palace of the Shoguns, and is included in the general entrance price, as well as the Honmaru Goren Palace, which was the summer palace of the Emperors after they were back in power, for which there is an additional entrance fee – but worth paying as it’s much quieter to look around. Both palaces also have their associated gardens to look around as well.

Having completed the Nijo Castle I walked the short distance over to the metro station by the castle and caught the subway over to the Gion district of town. This is the historic geisha district of the city, and where a lot of the tourist images of the city come from. These days it’s also, at times, a little overrun by tourists. I entered the district over the northwestern side and initially it didn’t appear that busy, but as I headed further in it became pretty clear that most of the tourists in Kyoto were here today, despite the less than pleasant weather, which made navigating the streets a slow process, and also quite difficult to see things when there is s sea of umbrellas everywhere.

I wandered up into the top part of the district and found a very nice little café selling Dango which is a Japanese dumpling made from regular and glutinous rice flour served grilled on a skewer, drizzled with sweet soy sauce and served with tea. It was a very pleasant lunch break, and also meant I missed a particularly heavy shower that passed through whilst I was eating.

I continued my wander through the Gion district before reaching the Ryozen Kannon Temple. The temple is one of the more modern in the city, constructed in the early 1950s as a memorial to the dead of WWII in the Pacific, with it’s defining feature being the giant 80ft high statue of Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Kannon), which is so large that it houses further shrines inside itself. On entering the complex along with a map your entrance fee also gives you an incense stick which is lit for you to take as you head towards the temple to visit the wishing ball and then place in the jokoro or incense burner in front of the main temple.

I spent quite a bit of time exploring the temple, but I was fighting against increasingly deteriorating weather. I finished at the temple and a quick check on the weather apps showed there was about a 20 minute gap before the next band of heavy rain was set to move in and last for several hours, so I decided that was a good a hint as any to start making my way back to the hotel to avoid the worst of the weather as it was a good 15 minute walk back to the subway station.

I made it back to the subway just before the next band of rain came over any by the time I emerged back at Nijo station it was hammering it down, so I was glad I only had a short walk over to the hotel to get back to my room and dry off.

Quite a bit later, with another brief pause in the rain, I headed back over to the same diner as the previous evening for a later dinner, before heading back to the hotel and another early night.