Kinkaku-ji Temple

A day of Temple after temple after temple with garden after temple...with a bamboo forest thrown into the mix.

The Golden temple here was used by the 3rd Shogun of Ashikaga as a summer house.

The bamboo forest was a great display of what a tall, beautiful plant bamboo is. Many gardens are decorated with bamboo hoops as fences or have bamboo posts with u shaped bamboo on top to protect the ends.

We also visited another with a beautiful garden, both planted and raked stones. I really enjoyed seeing the Stone garden. Such skill and precision in the raking.

In the evening we went to our last. The temple of 1000 red Tori gates. These places are rarely quiet.

For dinner, we ate tempura. Kyoto is the home of tempura. The restaurant was in the basement of the subway station. It was a Friday night and ram packed with locals having a good time. I commented that this was very unlike anything we might have in a UK train station and one of our group said, 'yeah you rarely have trains, and last time I ate in a train station in the UK I got food poisoning!'

I hung my head!