Last week's “The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water” post reminded me that I had not finished the story I started a year ago in “On The Way From The Kuuya-taki Waterfall”, so I'll go ahead and do that now.

In that story about my first visit to the Kuuya-taki waterfall (空也滝), upon returning to the road, Nicolas Joannin and I found another path going up a different direction and decided to take it to see where it went, and soon came across this sign:

The temple's name means “Ring/Circle of the Moon”.

The path was easy, but often steep...

After a half an hour of unrelenting ascent, we came across a bench and a sign that took the wind out of our already-slumping sails...

We were pretty much wiped out by that point, so decided to leave the temple for another day.

On the way down we caught sight of someone else descending the mountain, but they weren't on the path...

Set back but not defeated, I returned a few days later to try again.

The road that leads there doesn't go anywhere else (it dead ends), and is pretty dangerously thin/steep/crumbly, so even though there's something that might be called a road, you feel already in the middle of the wilderness by the time you start on the paths to the waterfall or the temple. So it was with some surprise that I came across a mailman...

We chatted a bit... it turns out that the post office makes normal daily delivery service to the temple an hour up the mountain, and to another temple an hour further beyond that. Wow.

I had a head start on him because he had to change to his hiking clothes, but he caught up to me quickly...

The estimate of an hour for the climb was dead on... 60 minutes exactly after starting up on the path, I broke out into the clearing at the temple, and received my first nice view...

To provide a bit of context, when clicking through to the larger version of the photo above, you'll be able to see two bridges near the center of the frame. The bridge at the sharp bend in the river to the left of center is the one I was standing on when I took this shot last December:

That was the lead post in “Revisiting December’s Arashiyama Outing: Dynamic Vistas and the Suzumushidera Temple”. The hike to the Tsukinowa-dera Temple is, I'm guessing, up one of the taller mountains in the background.

The other bridge, just south of the center of that frame, is Arashiyama's famous Togetsukyo Bridge (渡月橋), seen previously over the years on my blog here, here, and here.

Back to the hike up the mountain...

Unfortunately, after having hiked the hour up, there wasn't much of interest to my camera... a few rustic buildings, and that's about it.

The temple is at the red dot near the center, 60 minutes from the waterfall (highest dot on the river) and 50+10 minutes from the Atago Temple (which is on the highest peak overlooking Kyoto). I never did see that postman again, so he had probably continued up that way.