Today’s the day where we make our way to our final stop in Japan – Kyoto! It was an early wake up – 5:30am, for me to go to the onsen, followed by packing up at 6am, and departing for the Matsumoto bus terminal for our 7am departure. It was a 6 hour journey with all of us tired and Henry needing pretty continuous attention. It rained much of the day, the bus made rest stops every two hours, and the trip was uneventful.
We arrived in Kyoto and are staying nearby the train station. Hotels here seem much cheaper here than anywhere else and it will be convenient for catching the bullet train back to Tokyo. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll try to stay in Kyoto until the morning of our 3pm flight or go back to Tokyo the night before. It’s around 2 hours via bullet train to Tokyo station, or around 3.5 hours total to get to Tokyo Narita airport.
We went straight from the station to our “APA hotel”, but they wanted to charge $10 to check in at 2pm instead of 3pm, so we said we’d wait. They held our bags and we went to Higashi Hongan-ji Temple, a huge temple a short walk away and supposedly one of the largest wooden structures in the world. There was a huge open room covered in tatami mats, and Henry had fun crawling around and making friends with strangers.
Around 3pm we checked in to our hotel. I went to the onsen – reasonable, but there’s no cold pool and no natural light. There was, however, a cool one person hottub that I hadn’t seen before this. For dinner we had trouble finding any restaurants we liked in the streets (there’s a lot of things like chicken gizzard, beef tongue or sinue, etc that we’re not particularly keen on trying). We eventually found a big food court under the train station called Porta food hall that had lots of options. Viki wanted Italian, so we went to a pasta place and had Japanese style pasta.
Now we’re back to our hotel and will plan out how to spend our time in Kyoto tomorrow.
