Had an interesting time today. we were planning on taking the train from Kyoto to the outskirts to visit the Miho museum which sounded amazing from the reviews. It turned out that it was closed, so we had to review our plans. Shock horror! We decided to take advantage of our rail passes and take the train south of Kyoto to a place called Inara, whcih featured another load of shrines, massive park and trail of 4km of orange-red shrine gates through the wooded hills (over 10,000 of them, gates not hills). It was impressive. Along the way we had some rice wrapped in tofu called inari-zushi which was delicious. I (Loz) took some photos of other people's photos out of a book whilst waiting for the order to arrive.　I am so funny. (?btw all the photos here are ours i think).

From there we visited some Zen gardens next to Tofuku-ji designed in 1939 by a famous landscaper called Mirei Shigemori. the temple complex was cool, lots of massive pagodas and the gardens were great too. We got bitten to s*** by mosquitoes (I counted 26 on me) when we took a wrong turn up a path towards a graveyard but luckily we sorted that outat our next stop, the Otowa waterfall... One drink from this is supposed to cure all ailments. we think it did. As we were on a bit of a cheesytourist blitz we also checked out these love rocks at the rabbit shrine behind Kiyomizu-dera back in Kyoto. Me and Em took the love test and passed. I then made a wish to have more money as Japan is draining our resources fast. The taxi back to Kyoto didn't help so when given the opportunity to make a wish I did. Em chose world peace. I'm not sure she'll get it but half an hour later when buying ice creams I gave 2,000 yen and got change for 10,000 so it must have worked for me. Thats about 40 quid in UK terms so the books balanced once more. Nagoya and Takayama tomorrow. Robot museuem and Buddhist temple respectively. Its a hard life.