Kyoto; Wednesday, 16 April, 2025

Another late breakfast and back out of the hotel and onto the metro to go a couple of stops east and north to the Kyoto Gyoen National Garden. The garden was originally the grounds of the Imperial Palace when Kyoto was the capital of Japan and the park today is still home to several palaces, including right at the centre the Kyoto Imperial Place which was my first stop of the morning.

The whole park and palace were pretty quiet when I visited, so I was able to wander around in peace for most of my visit, though at the end several tour groups turned up so I think I must just have been out of synch with the tours again. Unlike in Nijo castle where you can go inside the palace buildings in the Imperial Palace it’s strictly outside views only and some of the buildings you can’t even get that close to.

After visiting the palace I headed back into the centre of Kyoto and stopped off at the Kaiten restaurant for a quick lunch before wandering over towards the complex of temples that I’d seen from the Kyoto Tower the previous evening to have a look around them all.

First up was actually a temple I wasn’t planning on visiting, but because there are multiple temples next door to each other I had a wander around the Koshoji Temple before realising it was the neighbour to the one I was actually intending on visiting. But there weren’t many tourists around, other than a couple of others who I think had made the same mistake as me, so it was quite nice to wander round a temple almost by myself.

I then headed next door to the Nishi Hongan-ji Temple complex where I had a long wander around the site taking in the multiple buildings before walking the short distance east to the even larger Higashi Hongan-ji Temple complex. The latter being home to one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. I spent quite a bit of time looking round the different temples before finally heading over to the Shoseien Gardens.

The Shoseien Gardens are the temple gardens for the Higashi Hongan-ji Temple and I spent quite a long time just wandering around the grounds. A lot of the temple gardens can be quite busy, but because the gardens are a good couple of hundred meters away from the parent temple complex not so many people visit them which makes that much quieter than they would otherwise have been. I spent so long wandering around the gardens that in the end I was one of the last to leave not quite being chased out by the guards, but they were coming up behind me sweeping up the last of the visitors.

From the Shoseien Gardens, as it was a really pleasant early evening, I walked the 2½KM over to Gion making it to the far side of the district and the now closing Kiyomizu-dera temple complex just before sunset. From the higher points of the district the views look due west, meaning its possible to get some pretty dramatic silhouette pictures of the traditional houses and the setting sun, including the five layered Yasaka Pagoda in the centre of the area, a photo opportunity that many other people were also taking at the same time. Thankfully, due to the steepness slope everyone can line up against one wall and not be in each others shots.

After taking quite a few sunset and nighttime photos in Gion I headed back down to the bus stop and picked up the bus back towards the hotel, with it conveniently dropping me off just outside my favourite diner, so I used that as an excuse to have a late dinner in there before heading back to the hotel and an early night.