A bit of a weird day today. We were heading from Matsue to Okayama but decided we'd shoot past Okayama and spend the afternoon in Kyoto. There's one temple there we wanted to see and we also wanted to see if we could get a really good kimono to hang on the wall back in Nelson. It's very hard to find secondhand kimonos - the sort of shops you might find them in are not those who have a searchable internet presence. We knew of an excellent one in Kyoto - Vintage Kimono An Gion - that we've looked around before. Hence the trip to Kyoto.
We had a three-leg train journey - Matsue to Okayama to Shin-Osaka to Kyoto, but there was just enough of a gap to drop our bags at our Okayama hotel before catching the next leg.
 |
| A pair of nice bento boxes for the train trip |
Okayama was our first real contact with tourists on this whole trip so far. Not vast numbers, but enough to be obvious. This compared to seeing one or two non-Japanese per day until now, which I must say we have loved. It was a bit tricky finding our hotel in Okayama even though it was accessed directly off the station but one of the railways staff pointed us in the right direction.
The arrival at Kyoto was a major shock. Tourists outnumbered the locals. Loud voices, a clogged station, even the local bus we took to the kimono shop was full of them.
 |
| Vintage Kimono An Gion |
The shop was a bit of a disappointment as we couldn't find the sort of kimono we were looking for , and even if we could have, the price would have been more than we would have wanted to spend. We considered buying an obi, the wide belt used for kimonos, but again couldn't find the right one.
So having failed miserably, we set off on foot for Kiyomizu-Dera, a very famous temple set high on a hillside. Walking there was awful. We have become used to being by ourselves, and often the only people around, but the narrow roads towards the temple were lined with tourist-focussed food and souvenir shops, and there were so many tourists walking up and down that progress was slow and awkward. Russian, American, and Chinese voices everywhere. We felt totally out of place. The temple was clearly amazing, but we felt no inclination to go inside, as the pressing throng of people destroyed the experience for us. We just turned round and went back to Okayama!
 |
| A nice pagoda, and swarms of tourists, on the way to Kiyomizu-Dera Temple |
 |
| Kiyomizu-Dera temple |
It had made us realise that the effort we have made planning this trip and going to unusual and smaller places, before the main tourist season, has been totally worth it. Even our biggest city to date, Matsue, only gets 5000 tourists a year! We saw more than that between the kimono shop and the temple in just 20 minutes today. I should add that I am well aware that we were adding another two to the crowd!
We would now not consider visiting Kyoto or any of the popular Japanese destinations except well off-season. Our previous trip was well before tourist season, and not long after Covid, so we were spoilt. The first trip was at the end of Winter, so again not many people about. Again, living in Ceret meant not too many tourists as the pressure in that corner of France is nowhere near what it is in say, the French Riviera or Paris.
Back in quiet Okayama, we rested for an hour or so before going out for our first ramen of the trip. Choosing it was done on a machine - feed in the money, pick the meal, get a ticket which you hand to the staff behind the counter who make it. We'd both been looking forward to it, but nice as they were, it is after all a light soup with noodles and a topping of spring onions and pork slices. Pleasant, but not up the the izakaya meals. The chocolate ice-cream bar afterwards helped though.
 |
| Our ramen soups |
 |
| The ticket vending machine for our ramen soup |
