I wrote the other day about some hiking in the hills of eastern Kyoto, finishing up that story noting that a trail we took came out at the back of a "sorta' famous spot", which if you looked at any of the map links, you realized was the Kiyomizu Temple.

This internationally-known cultural attraction is less than 1.2 miles from my house, but I've only been to it a few times, most recently just to photograph the front during one of Kyoto's evening light-up events (with the first photo on that post being the entrance area of Kiyomizu Temple). I [...]

Well, I fall further behind. I had been planning to post the answer to the What am I? quiz from the other day (none of the guesses so far are even close), but Fumie has been quite sick, so I wanted to get Anthony out of the house so that she could rest. I'd been wanting to try some nearby hiking trails, and I ended up with enough photos to fill at least five different blog posts.

We started out after lunch with the grueling seven-minute drive up to Shogunzuka. (We hit a few red lights, so it took longer [...]

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 [...]

Here are a few more pics from the early part of my visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) with Anthony yesterday....

I tend to take pictures of them whenever I see them (all the time), so I'm surprised that they've appeared on my blog only three times in the past, in posts about Arashiyama, Giouji Temple, and Konpukuji Temple (update: and Miyajima).

Part of yesterday's Elaborate Sub-Shrine facing the pretty lake....

I really liked the rack of gate offerings, as (I think) they made for some great imagery.

The real gates weren't so bad themselves, of course; with paths [...]

Wow.

Wow wow wow.

I've lived in this part of the world for the better half of the last 20 years, but today was my first visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in south-east Kyoto, and it was amazing.

I'd heard enough about it to know that it had a path lined with a bunch of torii gates, but I was totally unprepared for the thousands and thousands of gates lining miles of mountain paths.

And frankly, that wasn't even the best part, but it was such a visually-overwhelming experience for someone with an eye toward photography that I [...]