I had quite the photogenic day on Monday, with a local outing in the morning to see a nearby temple's fall foliage, then a ride into the mountains to see by bicycle some of the places seen during the weekend's “First Taste of Kyoto’s Fall-Foliage Season, 2017 Edition” post.

Today's post is about the bicycle ride (view at Strava).

The photo that opens this post is the entrance path to the Koetsu-ji Temple (光悦寺), which I pass on the edge of town just before entering the mountains and making the climb toward Kyomi Pass. We first saw it on my blog three weeks ago, in all green, here. Indeed, as I speculated there, it's spectacular dressed in fall colors, but also as expected, it was crowded.

I took the photo above expecting it to simply illustrate “crowded”, but I really like its vibe, so I made desktop-background versions.

A lady kindly took my photo for me.

On the way down I came across Yasukawa-san, who had invited me on the trip to Norikura last year. We had a nice chat for a bit.

My post “Cycling to Kyoto’s Ochiba Shrine Amid the Fall Colors” two years ago is similar to today's, but has a better photo of the bridge, here.

I wonder how long ago the bridge was in use. It now leads to nowhere (the road just stops), because, I assume, the construction for the current modern roads completely changed the landscape in the area.

The main thing I wanted to do on this ride was make the short climb up to the Soren-ji Temple, which until now I'd visited only by car.

I made a segment on Strava for it, but 50 of the 52 registered rides are incorrectly attributed to this segment due to bad GPS data. In looking at them, most were recorded with Strava's iPhone app, and the pattern of wonky GPS is really consistent. I'm guessing that they all suffered the insidious iOS snap-to-road “Feature” long enough for the iPhone to think they were on this steep climb, until realizing that they couldn't be and yanking them back to the flat road they were actually zipping by on.

As it is, I think at the moment only the two slowest recorded rides are actually riding this 400m @ 11% climb. Mine is the faster of the slowest, so I've got the moral “KOM”, at least until a real cyclist shows up. 🙂

From the data above it's clear that it's not common among cyclists, but it's so lovely up there.

The leaf-covered steps were a bit nicer a couple of years ago, as seen in the post about my first visit to this temple, “A Few Pretty Pictures from Kyoto’s Middle-of-Nowhere Sourenji Temple”. Some photos of this stairway also appeared on “Kyoto’s Souren-ji Temple at f/1.2”.

After the temple the road descends sharply, then dead ends as far as cars are concerned, but there's a path that a bicycle can take...

Then I went down to the village to poke around its paths and alleys.

Then I headed north for a bit....

I'm not squared up with the gate and the building in the shot above because the lady seen in the prior photo was camped where I wanted to be, standing in front of her tripod seemingly doing some light browsing on her phone, completely ignoring her camera, the shrine, and folks waiting for her to move. After a while, I finally gingerly asked whether she was standing in that particular spot for a particular reason, and she replied in English “I don't speak Japanese”. So I repeated my question in English, and she said that no, she wasn't there for a particular reason, and went back to her phone.

This was fairly jarring. It was clear that she wasn't trying to be mean or troublesome, but that she simply didn't consider that she might be bothering others. One could guess from her accent where she was from, and roll your eyes and think “yeah, those people tend to be pretty rude”, but I try so hard not to do that. Each person is individual.

I finally ask whether she'd be so kind as to move just a bit over, at which point it finally dawned on her, and she moved slightly out of the way. Japanese folks looking on smiled in appreciation of my efforts.

And as inconsiderate as she was, she willingly agreed to snap a photo for me when I asked...

I then spent a few minutes digging among the leaves looking for part of my polarizing filter... I had dropped it while taking this photo and the clickspring that holds the glass in had apparently sprung out and away. I hoped I might find it, but didn't. One of the Japanese photographers even helped digging through the leaves for a while. Very kind.

Then I headed back home...

I didn't make the detour to see the maple this time. I'd done so two years ago (blogged here) and came away with a flat and missing bolts on my cleats.

However, I did take the next detour...

It was a lovely road that went for about a kilometer, at a mild average of 5%. It ended at a graveyard.

I made a Strava segment for this ride as well, as there wasn't already one.

The path continued past the cemetery. Normally I'd not take this kind of path on my road bike, but it was mostly grass over dirt, so it was quite easy riding except for the occasional rock or log...

At this point I was about a minute's walk from the Himuro Shrine that I posed about seven years ago, but I couldn't get to it. It's just as well, because I wanted to return to take pictures of the road I'd just ridden.

The tree that had fallen across the path had been really quite tall... here it is looking down its length...

I returned to the main road and continued up and over Kyomi Pass.

As I was flying down from Kyomi Pass toward Kyoto, I passed Henry Foster making his way up. I'd ridden with Henry on one of my first rides years ago. I did a quick U-Turn and killed myself to catch up to him to say “hi”, and to snap a blurry photo...

Then I continued down again. About 10 years ago, a section of twisty mountain road was replaced by a wide, modern road with sweeping turns, and until now I'd never taken the old section of road on a bike, so I thought I'd give it a go today.

By the time I came by the temple seen in the first photo of this article, it was almost 5pm and few people were around, so I could get a nicer photo:

I would have liked to have taken the photo from a lower vantage point, but another photographer's head was immediately below my camera as I took the shot.

The signs on either side of the entrance are tastefully done, though the one on the right doesn't seem to be very effective. 🙂

I was careful, of course, to be considerate of all, though at that hour there was almost no one around.