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Day 7

N.B. This was written shortly after I returned and will be rewritten as and when I get time.

The typhoon had passed by and the weather was glorious and stayed that way for the rest of the trip.

Leaving the guest house, we went to the main Hakone station for our first ride on the Bullet Train (which is a translation of the old project name and is actually called the Shinkansen).

The train is stunning and zips by at 270kmh (~160mph), the entire train is air cushioned meaning it’s quiet and smooth. The second picture doesn’t really show you the amount of leg room you get on these, you can pretty much stretch your legs out and only just touch the seat in front of you. For being 40 year old technology, the Shinkansen just blows away anything we have here in the UK.

The hour and half journey to Kyoto went by swiftly and our first port of call after dropping our bags in the gorgeous ryokan was Kyomizu-ji, one of the oldest and most visited temples in Kyoto (which avoided the bombing of WWII so a lot of the temples are original).

Kyomizu-ji managed to be uniquely different to all the other temples we’d yet been to, with it’s signature temple on 400 year old camphor-wood stilts and various other attractions. The main one being the “Love Rock”, which is two stones separated by about 4 metres, and couples start at each stone and walk towards each other with eyes closed; if they meet in the middle without falling over or bumping into people then they’re “meant to be”. I saw two school-boys doing it (numerous times), as well as a single woman doing it (a different kind of love, a forbidden love).

Moving on we walked through Hagashiyama park on towards our meeting with another tour guide.

We met up with Peter Macintosh, basically a world reknowned expert on Geisha. He was recently hired by a Hollywood studio to do research and location scouting for “Memoirs of a Geisha”. He’s been in Japan for 13 years, owns his own bar and is married to an ex-geisha so he knows his stuff, he also seems to know half the people in the Geisha districts.

The first picture is of a 14 year old maiko we met who Peter asked about her mother and so forth so evidently they knew each other. The second is of a typical geisha residence, the latern above the door has three circles which (I think) denotes the Miyagawa-cho geisha district (the other two being Gion-cho and Ponto-cho). The only good photo of a full geisha is there, they may have wooden sandals and can’t move their legs much but boy, they can really book it. All my other photos were of geisha blurs. The lighting at this time was absolutely stunning and my Gion photos are some of my favourites.

The last image is taken from a bridge which is apparently where the protagonist of MoaG meets the love of her life and is an awesome picture if it wasn’t for that annoying bit of foliage in front of the lens. After the tour we all had food at a local restaurant (geisha-free unfortunately). Peter also said that if we wanted to (as a group) we could hire a geisha for the evening, however some people were against it which meant the price for the people who wanted to do it was prohibitive.

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19 September 2006