We had a bit of a lie in and then caught a long 45-minute city bus to Arashiyama with a plan to catch several attractions in the popular area. I found this article with a recommended order for visiting sites, but did not expect us to get through all of it.
The first stop on the suggested itinerary was the Monkey Park. Most animal-themed travel activities are unethical, and wild monkeys are assholes based on my past experiences in places like Costa Rica and Gibraltar. But since this is Japan and they’re better than most people, I went ahead and did a little online research, liked what I read, and decided it was worth a shot.
One of the things I read online was that after you pay your admission (600 yen/$4 USD per person) there’s a bit of a hike up to the top of the mountain hill where the monkeys live. They were not lying. Well, if the weather had been more temperate it might not have seemed like a big deal. But, alas, it was Japan in July and I ALMOST DIED. Luckily there was a fair amount of shade and a couple of rest areas with big fans that saved my life.
Along the route up the mountain were intermittent signs educating people on the rules of the park. These were increasing my confidence that this was going to be a good experience.
Humans were contained within roped off areas, and most of the hilltop was monkey-only zones. The humans were told repeatedly and supervised to make sure they respected the monkeys and didn’t feed them unauthorized food. There was a small one-room building that humans went in to buy the authorized food and feed it out through windows to the interested monkeys. The monkeys did not act desperate for the food, and seemed to understand that the building was the only place to get food from humans as they did not intentionally approach humans outside of the building. This was easily the best wild-ish monkey experience I’ve ever had.
The Monkey Park also had the added bonus of a nice view with a mildly cooler temperature.
Togetsukyo Bridge was next on the suggested itinerary, which was a short walk from the Monkey Park exit. It apparently has a 400+ year history, but mostly we cared about the pretty walk.
The next agenda item on that suggested itinerary was Tenryuji Temple but we felt “templed out” at this point in the trip. But we did want to check out the famous local bamboo grove and when the itinerary said “Leave Tenryuji through the back entrance” as the route, it didn’t occur to us that you had to pay to get into the Temple area where that back entrance was. So we ended up walking a ways into the temple grounds before we discovered the payment barrier, and had to backtrack a bit and use Google Maps to find our way to the grove. The free parts of the temple grounds did have some lovely spots that we grabbed quite a few photos of… maybe we weren’t totally templed out after all.
We made it to the famous Arashiyama Bamboo Grove.
And after maybe 15 minutes we were done. Scott’s phone said it was 97 degrees F. And the tourists were obnoxious. And we could still remember our peaceful tourist-free walk through the bamboo during our atypical Fushimi Inari visit. Time to cut our losses and get back on a bus toward our hotel. There were several other stops on the Arashiyama itinerary that were of interest, but we know we will be back to Kyoto again in the future.
Once we got back to “our” neighborhood we stopped for dinner and G&Ts at HUB, a British-style pub that was populated almost entirely by Japanese locals. Food was pretty good. Yuzu gin was pretty great.
Kjar-ied Away 