My Japan Trip - Visiting The Kyoto Attractions

Hello there! It's my 11th post in the new World Map Pin community! Trying to do the tag as well! If you haven't read about them, please take a look at this link.

As background, I have done a few overseas trips last year, as some of my friends here would know, and I have been wanting to share some of the interesting places that I have visited. However, life has been busy and I have been procrastinating penning these entries and recently, I revisited this target of mine and finally broke the inertia!

One of my memorable trips in 2023 was to Tokyo, Japan, and during that trip, I did quite a few day trips to nearby cities and towns. This included trips to Karuizawa, Atami, Nikko, Kamakura, of course, Tokyo itself.

In 2024, which was earlier this year, I was back at Japan once more. This time, it was to Osaka, Japan. After a trip to Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, we next went to Kyoto!

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Firstly, can I say I was so heartened by all the positive comments of my previous post! It really amazed me how the Hive community and Worldmappin community were so encouraging with my travel sharings. And it meant a lot to me - whether it's in the form of comments, reblogs, or upvotes. Thanks for all the engagement and appreciation!

The main city of Kyoto wasn't too far off from Arashiyama, and over here, we visited two key attractions, namely Kinkaku-ji and Fushimi Inari Taisha. To ease the burden of finding the necessary transport and managing the logistics, we decided to join a local day tour for this. I know a lot of people are mixed about joining day tours because the flexibility aspect is compromised to a large extent, in exchange of ease of planning, but I guess we also have to weigh both sides.

So it was a fast ride on the coach before we arrived at Kinkaku-ji, which translates to Golden Pavilion, and is a temple. There's a lot of history to this, but if you are not into Japanese history, the highlight for visitors would be the architecture. Not only it is surrounded by amazing greenery, the temple overlooks a pond and creates a nice reflection for photo lovers.

You probably couldn't tell but this place was extremely crowded with visitors. Everyone was just walking the grounds and taking photos, and because we were on a day tour, we barely had much time to appreciate the zen vibes in this place and we were off to the next destination. Still an interesting visit though!

Next up, we reached Fushimi Inari Taisha! Fushimi Inari Taisha is famous for its shrines, some would call torii gates! A check from Google said that there are approximately 10,000 torii gates over here! This is the entrance.

And we encountered probably the first torii gate on our way in!

As you could probably tell, similar to Kinkaku-ji, this place was swarming with tourists too! It was gates after gates, and I think this was very unique because I don't think you can find such attractions or structures anywhere outside Japan.

Due to limited time, we didn't hike the path all the way to see the 10,000 torii gates! We stopped somewhere in between (I didn't count how many we walked through) and made our way down. Haha.

On our way back to the coach, chanced upon this little river/stream not too far from the attraction, and I thought this felt like a very zen and peaceful place. All in all, Kyoto is indeed a place full of culture and zen vibes in my view and on hindsight, I would have allocated more time during the trip to explore this wonderful city.

Have you been to Kyoto? Let me know in the comments if you have been here too, and what are your thoughts about this place?

Finally, thanks for reading my post in the community under World Map Pin! More to come I promise! :)

P.S. I have also tried to document my posts in one table so it's easy to reference too!

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