Anti-Tourism
Monday 19th March
Kyoto is battered by tourists even more than Tokyo is. Although there aren’t as many visitors there at one time, it’s much, much smaller, so the density is a lot higher, I think, I was never that great at maths. Anyway, determined not to be a tourist and just see everything that everyone else has taken a million photos of and written a million books about, I decided to leave the guidebook at home for one day, hop on my bike, and go where the wind decided to take me.
I quickly abandoned the wind plan as it would have quite quickly taken me into the large river that meanders through Kyoto, so instead I just kept taking random turns and exploring whatever looked exciting as a result. Whilst I couldn’t totally escape from the other visitors, I found a few places that were virtually abandoned, something almost totally unheard of at this time of year.
The first thing I found was a tiny little shrine which was absolutely empty, just off a small street near the centre of the town. Dwarfed both in size and importance by larger nearby shrines, this place lacked the tourist information booth and ice-cream vending machine that others offer. I’m guessing that Haagen-Daaz cookie crunch ice-cream is not a traditional food of Japan, so I was glad I’d finally found somewhere that had held onto it’s identity so well.
The third picture of this set shows an Omikuji (fortune slip). People tie these to either fences (if they are there to hold them) or tree branches. Seeing a huge tree covered in these blowing in the wind is a powerful image, when you consider that every single one was tied on by someone wishing for something.
After I left the shrine, I continued on my merry way down the main road, turning off at some random little side street. I was hoping to find some utterly secret, minute little temple that I could explore on my own. What I found instead was a huge Buddist temple with a huge garden and a car park. Normally my “tourist honeypot” alarm would have gone off so loud people nearby would hear it, but this place seemed totally abandoned, bar from a few Japanese holiday makers.
What really made this place stand out, however, was the graveyard behind it. Totally open to the public, I decided to head over and have a look. In the entire graveyard, in the middle of one of the most tourist friendly cities in the world, were about three people. I was overjoyed and went into camera overdrive, determined to catch a photo that did justice to this awesome spectacle.
Well, I tried anyway. You can’t really see from these photos, but this was only a tiny part of the entire thing. It was huge, and I know if I ever head back to Kyoto, I’ll waste all my time trying to find this place…
Anyway, that’s my story for my second day in Kyoto. I spent the rest of the day viewing the city by bike, not really stopping, just covering a lot of miles, before heading back to the hostel and collapsing in a heap. Little did I know that I’d hardly begun to see anything amazing…