It's not that I don't have enough recent stuff that I'm behind on to post about, but I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to jump back half a year to when the fall foliage first started showing its colors in the area, to a November 9th visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga, an hour's drive from Kyoto. This is the same temple featured in "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", about the many bibbed statues representing children who died before their parents.

The fall colors don't arrive in full force this area [...]

The flood of photo opportunities I enjoyed last November at the start of Kyoto's fall-foliage season began with a visit to the Kongourinji Temple in Shiga. I posted about it in "First Taste of Fall Colors" and "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", but the aforementioned flood has kept me from following up with the main attractions from the visit.

The main stuff still awaits, but today's post moves us one step closer.

The path to the temple's main garden leads through an area that seems as pretty as a small garden in its own right...

I [...]

Early last month, at the start of a most photogenic fall-foliage season in the Kyoto area, I posted "First Taste of Fall Colors at Shiga's Amazing Kongourinji Temple", ending that post with this photo:

I had intended a quick followup post to explain the "300 meters of sorrow and anguish await" caption of that photo, but I was precluded from doing so by a subsequent succession of visits to other amazing places (including the Konzou Temple, the Kotou-in Temple, the most impressive Yoshiminedera Temple, the Sanzen-in Temple, the Sokusouji Temple, the gardens at Shouzan, the Iwato Ochiba Shrine, among others). [...]

Last week, Kyoto friend Britto posted on his blog about a couple of recent bicycle trips he'd recently taken, including one to a shrine in the mountains north of Kyoto that sounded so appealing that I went there myself the next day (though I went by motorbike). Paul Barr is still in town, so I invited him along; that's him in the photos above.

It was a long and steep enough trip on the scooter... mad props to Britto for doing it on a bicycle!

In the shrine's name (岩戸落葉神社; iwato ochiba jinja), iwato means "rock above a cave entrance", [...]

I visited the gardens at the Shouzan Resort in north-west Kyoto the other day, and was blown away by the beauty of the fall colors. Unlike all the other places I've blogged about recently, it's not a temple or shrine... just a very well done private garden at a large restaurant/wedding/getaway complex (they use the word "resort", but that feels too extravagant a word for the non-garden parts, and not extravagant enough for the garden at this time of year).

As has been the case for the last few weeks, I don't have the energy for a proper writeup yet, [...]