Daimonji-Yama (Kyoto)

Today we had an even slower day than usual. Reason: the weather has finally called my bluff about the ownership of the umbrella. So we used the excuse of waiting it out to get a proper sleep in.

Once we did get going though, I decided I needed another look at Kyoto. Especially since its practically right around the corner. And this time find something with a view over the city. At which point I stumbled across this post talking about an easy walk with a beautiful view over the city. Given the level of description though, this did not really seem on the beaten path. Which only sounded like a bonus. (Spoilers: there were no signs to guide you, and any signs that did exist were purely in Kanji.)

I did mention the starting late part though, right? In order to get there I had to take the train to Kyoto, then manage to find a bus to take me to the far edge of town, and then actually find the walk, all of which didn't seem to quite go flawlessly. Essentially, it was already getting kind of dark while I was still at the bottom, and you always gain confidence when the text says things like "three flight of steps" and you realize that each "flight" is 45 steps high. But with enough persevering, and with close staring at the guide, I made it to the top, and what a view it was!

Even the temperature was kind of perfect up there for the climb that I went through. The serenity, the cicadas, the view over the city, and the fact that I had it almost all to myself, I could have relaxed up there for another month. Eventually someone did join me though and I started to become a little self conscious of the noise my timelapse was making. Now on all my previous travels, I used a DSLR, with a big mirror that was never exactly quiet. Even though I almost exclusively would operate the camera in "silent" mode. For the first time, I'm traveling with a mirrorless and I've been operating that mostly in "Electronic Shutter mode". However, that doesn't work for exposure times above 0.5s, and since I had the camera static anyway, I told it to just use ISO100 with the shutter. A tiny little shutter with no mirror. It felt so loud, compared to the cicadas mixed with a little bit of faint city noise.

While there was certainly lots of dramatic cloud around, the visibility was also beautiful. On the right in the above you can see the pink Kyoto tower fairly prominantly showing where the station is. On the horizon to the left, I'm pretty sure that's Osaka. As the crow flies, it's 40km from Kyoto to Osaka station. And the lights barely seem to slow down between the two.

Eventually I did have to go back down though, a thought that started pressing itself with some urgency after working out just how pitch black it was. The path up was largly unpaved, somewhat confusing, and had zero lighting. Luckily, I did ensure that my portable torch was on me and charged as I started my venture up. And after this I can confidently say that a small bright torch (not this flimsy thing on your phone) should be part of everybody's travel kit. It provided beautiful illumination of the path and ... all the spiders.

I'm not too sure I would have ventured up so bravely if I had noticed the sheer number of webs with fairly large spiders in them, just a couple of cm above my head. Luckily what it also illuminated was the spider that literally lowered itself into my way directly in front of me. After some waiting though, it thought better of it, returned back up, and I did not waste any time getting the heck past it. I also did not take any pictures. I hate spiders.

Having made it back to the bottom and onto pavement, I still needed to make it back to more normal civilisation. I felt very self conscious as I could hear my every footstep on the pavement in my sneakers and I don't generally have loud footsteps. After some more walking I slowly started to make it to a more normal street though with a cute little restaurant every 100m or so. If I was more food adventurous, I'd probably have been in heaven. And after another several km of slowly growing lights, I even managed to find a subway station again.

From there the rest was easy. I got myself a curry in the vicinity of Kyoto station, and then comfortably took the express back home. My legs reckon that for a day which practically started in the pm, they did their job and are very much enjoying kicking back.