You are not in Kyoto if you do not visit the famous Fushimi Inari temple on the outskirts of this ancient Japanese city. And that was what we did on the last full day of our short vacation in Japan almost five years ago. Whereas we had spent the whole morning eating and wandering the area north of the Kyoto rail station, in the afternoon we took a short train ride to the Inari station. From there, we crossed the road and there we were at the entrance into the temple! Mind you, nobody could get themselves lost here. One can either follow the crowd or choose to follow the unmistakable landmarks that led you forward. But first, here is a short video of part of the train ride.
All these little brightly coloured structures - some are sub-shrines - meant only one thing: that we were on the right track to the Fushimi Inari temple.
And pretty soon, we had arrived at the entrance which was guarded by two stone foxes on either side of the steps. But then we were sidetracked to various stalls selling Japanese street food. Another round of nibbling and eating for us before we could finally venture through this first of many hundreds (or thousands) of Torii arches.
To be frank, by the time we had arrived at this section, we were already overwhelmed by the thousands upon thousands of the Torii arches. We could continue walking beneath these arches until we reached the top of Mount Inari but because the day had been wet - it had been raining lightly since we arrived in the morning - we decided to call it a day in Kyoto. We took a different path back to the rail station and it took us through some wonderfully secluded wooded areas of the temple grounds.
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