For our final full day in Kyoto, we wanted to check out the rest of the main sights in Hagashiyama. We took the Keihan Line train from Kyoto Station to the Kiyomizu-Gojo station. From there, it was about a 20 minute walk east to the first temple of the day, the famous Kiyomizu Temple. This is another one of the highly recognizable Kyoto temples with a commanding position overlooking Kyoto. Kiyomizu is a Buddhist temple that is Kyoto's heart and soul. The temple ...

Today we started off with a visit to the Northwest suburbs of Kyoto -- the Arashiyama district. Arashiyama is located at the base of the mountains and is considered Kyoto's most important sightseeing district after Hagashiyama. And even though it wasn't the weekend (yet), on this Friday it seemed everyone in Kyoto was out here viewing the spectacular sights. We started off by taking the metro to Kyoto Station where we needed to get on the JR Sagano line and take...

Today started with early ceremonies at the temple. First there was a prayer service at 7am, followed by a very interesting fire burning ceremony at a building up the street at 7:30am. Prior to the fire burning ceremony, we had written wishes for health and prosperity for our family and friends on wooden sticks, and gave them to the monk to burn at the ceremony. Hopefully our wishes will come true! By the time we returned to our room (it was BITTER COLD outside a...

We left our bags in the Sakara common room early and took the metro to the JR Kyoto Station. We packed warm clothes including all our scarves, gloves and hats because it was FREEZING COLD today. We needed to get to Shin-Imamiya station in suburban Osaka to buy our tickets to Mt. Koya (Koyasan). We got to Shin-Imamiya easily using our JR pass and then purchased our tickets. This ticket combination allowed us to to from Shin-Imamiya to Gokurakubashi from where we w...

After checking out from the Daiwa Roynet we took a taxi to the Hiroshima station for to catch our 8:15am shinkansen to Kyoto! We are very excited to see Kyoto -- for many it is the jewel of Japan. We are going to be there right during the peak of the leave changing, so we know everything will be crowded! We boarded our train for the slightly under 2 hour trip to Shin-Osaka. There we transferred to another shinkansen for the short ride to Kyoto Station. Upon arri...