Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2 about our visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社).....

A short climb from the pretty lake mentioned in Part 1, you come, surprisingly, across a couple of small buildings, one a restaurant, straddling the path:

We stopped for a juice, and to chat with the lady. She was 86, and the fourth generation of her family to own/run the little restaurant. The shrine owns the land, but for whatever reason, the family has these buildings. The building across the path was her house; she had been born there.

I found out later, from another such living-on-the-mountain lady, that there were 18 of these homesteads on shrine property. (The other lady was 72 years old, and also been born in a little house alongside the gate-filled path.)

There were fox idols everywhere, usually decorated with a weather-worn bib of some sort. I think they represent guardians or the like, but there were so many that I sometimes felt worried that Moses would come smite the whole place. These temple/shrine things are cultural to me – not religious – just as they are for most Japanese as well, but I suspect that at this location, there are more than usual for whom it is religious. (Regardless of my own feelings, I always treat these places with respect; I wouldn't want to offend those for whom it does have meaning.)

I mentioned in Part 1 that you sometimes saw sets of orange gates off in the distance; what I failed to mention was the “distance” was sometimes vertical as well as lateral, so sometimes you got views like this:

We were treated to this extra view because we left the beaten path (so to speak) to take a sub-path to the geocache that I mentioned in Part 1. We were looking for The Guardian Fox cache, hidden in 2003 by a couple of guys from Kyoto. We found it easily, just like at least (according to the logs at that link) 60 people before us....

On the way to the shrine, we'd stopped by a store and picked up a couple of Hello Kitty keychain figurines, and a small jar of Ramune candies. We placed these in the cache, and took back with us a few things from among the small collection inside. Anthony picked a small keychain with a picture of a Chinese vase, and a (pre-Euro) coin from what looks to be a European country. I picked a tiny toy carabiner that I now have clipped to my camera case.

We carefully put everything back, and returned to the main path.

Not far from the geocache is a crossroads where several paths cross, and one of the few places we found that offered a nice view of southern Kyoto...

(The elevated expressway you can see in the distance is the No. 2 Kyoto-Osaka Expressway that I wrote about last year.)

There were (like everywhere else) little sub-shrines all around, including at the junction area. I snapped this next picture there, and I'm not sure why because it really has nothing to offer, but for some reason, I really like it...

Having accomplished the goal of finding the geocache “treasure”, and lacking a map or any particular idea on what to do next, I let Anthony pick which path we should take from the crossroads. He picked one that looked somewhat dark and foreboding....

It quickly brightened up, and turned out to be quite nice. I trailed Anthony for a while, snapping pics....

We eventually came upon a really interesting area that I'll have to write about another time, but let's just say that there were a lot of foxes....