Monday, July 15, 2024

Today was our Fushimi Inari day. After a quick bakery snack and coffee at Cafe Veloce, we tried really hard to take transit from Kyoto Station but we had the hardest time figuring it out for some reason (I blame humidity fatigue and annoyance at other tourists). After wandering around the whole place twice we eventually determined that we were supposed to take the JR line. We tried our Suica cards but they weren’t working, and the line to buy tickets at the machine was ginormous. So we gave up and got a taxi that was about $14.

In case the ridiculous train ticket lines at Kyoto Station weren’t enough of an indication, Fushimi Inari is one of the most popular places to visit in Kyoto, known as the shrine with 10,000 torii gates. This is not an exaggeration. It really has “roughly” that many. But it also has roughly that many tourists visiting on any given day. Lucky for us, our Free Walking Tour guide had given us the inside scoop on an obscure route up the mountain that deviated from the throngs.

Like everyone else we started at the main shrine, and enjoyed the statues of Inari, the kami of rice, who is represented as a fox.

So here’s the secret route tip. Start with everyone else and their cousin up the main path.

But then divert and follow the green arrows indicated here:

For the most part just stick on that same trail indicated in Google maps with waypoints such as Kobogataki Falls, Aokigataki, and Shiragiku Waterfall (spoiler alert: not really what we would consider waterfalls). We ended our upward trek at the Summit of Mt. Inari? Definitely at Suehiroya, but more on that in a moment. Along the way we would occasionally see signs like this that helped us feel confident of our route.

The highlights of taking this trail up instead of the main pathway (I mean aside from there being almost no one on it) include:

*A bamboo forest with almost no one there. Warning: it’ll make the popular Arashiyama one kind of intolerable for you (stay tuned for the July 19th post).

(Side note: What kind of asshole do you have to be to vandalize bamboo?)

*Gorgeous, silent, peaceful shrines. With almost no one there.

*Just… nature, beautiful nature. And if you’re extra lucky, a sleeping kitty. With almost no one there.

A couple warnings about this route: First off, there are signs indicating wild boar inhabit the area. There is a fence designed to keep them away from the trail, but apparently they still warrant signage. We didn’t see any. I’m not sure how scared I would have been if I had seen them as I have zero experience with them.

Also, in July, in the nasty humidity of July in Japan (#neveragain), this trail is the muggiest of the muggy. I wish I had video of Scott wringing out his shirt. Even the torii were sweating.

As is typical of high humidity in nature, one might be eaten alive by mosquitos. Might. I wouldn’t know. Actually I would totally know.

Finally, one might make the mistake of taking a wrong turn and adding 10,000 steps up a VERY steep hillside covered in shrines when you are hitting the end of your endurance and hydration. Be careful as you approach Suehiro Okami. There’s a stump or maybe a large rock with what might be a misleading sign. My memory of this is not great – I think I was hitting some dehydration issues at this point – and we didn’t take a picture of it. Luckily some other tourists came along when we were up the hill who had made the same mistake and were working out how to backtrack and get back on the regular trail. We almost died but then we followed them and we lived.

We eventually ended our upward trek at maybe the Summit? We saw this (not our pic) and entered a smallish area behind it…

…but never saw this? (Again, not our pic.)

There was a pathway that was blocked with a sign so maybe the final summit/shrine/view was not accessible the day we were there? There were quite a few confused tourists here, so we weren’t alone (cognitively, emotionally, or physically).

We were no longer physically alone because this is where that main, heavily trafficked tourist trail also leads. The primary benefit of this was the existence of a small gift shop selling the best ice cream that ever existed ever. Or maybe it just seemed that way because we earned it.

I was done with mosquitos so we decided to take the main pathway back down the mountain. The majority of the tourists had subsided and along the way we got a great view over Kyoto. When you go down you can see the names of the torii donors etched on the backsides of the gates. And you can look backwards and be thankful you’re not going uphill anymore.

We sought out the main shopping street as we left the shrine grounds and indulged in a couple more treats. Don’t judge my hair – I almost died today.

Thanks to our nutritious snacks we found the cognitive capacity to take transit back to Kyoto Station. There we found our way to a place called Craft Beer Market (weird) that had a great selection. They sat us on the tallest stools ever facing a wall but also gave us little snacks so I forgave them.