Kansai Japan 日本關西

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Spent a few days in Japan, touring around Kansai area. We took a midnight flight to Kansai Airport and arrived in the early morning. The first stop was the farther city Shirahama (白浜). This is a famous city known for its hotspring and seafood, but it took us two hours or so railway time.

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Hotels there usually have hotspring built inside. The room rate offers you a night for stay plus dinner and breakfast, so called 一泊兩食. We picked a hotel close to the coast as I know that they have quite a good hotspring. Below are the pictures of the hotel.

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My room. We got a room with built-in outdoor bath on the balcony. Room is quite big and user friendly, which means I can walk into the shower area to clean myself and there is another door from shower area to the outdoor wooden bathtub. Beds and settings are Japanese style. comfortable and decent.

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After we dropped our bags, we went to walk around the city. It is a small city with nice beach and some sight-seeing spots. The famous one for photography is the Engetsuto Island (円月島). People used to take photo during sunset and tried to put the sun in the hole of the island, but I found it impossible at the time I visited.

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They have a big market with lots of seafood. We saw the whole process of cutting a tuna......

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Hotsping......Our hotel has a good variety of hotsping. Public baths for male and female separately, a mixed bath for both sex together (with their special clothing of course) and 3 private bath house. It turned out that we went to all 3 private bath houses. We went to the first one without any camera device so we only took pictures of two of the private bath houses. All 3 house have different temperature and furnishes, all facing the pacific ocean.

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Day 2, we went to Kyoto. Kyoto was the main theme of our visit this time. We were there in the afternoon after 3 hour railway. We left our bags at the station and went to our first spot, Sagano Torokko Train. This is a special small train touring around Arashiyama (嵐山) and Hozu River (保津峽). We went late and did not make any reservation for the ticket, but fortunately we got tickets for the fifth cart finally (which is a open cart without window).

We only got one ticket with seat number and another ticket was a standing ticket, which was only available in the fifth cart. I found that the standing ticket was even nicer as I can see the view of both sides and took pictures.

The third picture was the Hozu River, I thought of Tairuko (太魯閣) in Taiwan.

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Journey for the train is about 30 minutes. We spent the rest of the day walking around Arashiyama. Tenryu-ji Temple (天龍寺) is close to the train station, by an about 10 minute walk. This is a world culture heritage, but by saying that is somehow meaningless, there are a lot of culture heritage in Kyoto.....

We picked this time to visit because it is the time to see the colour changing of maple leaf.......

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There are a number of different temples around too......

After the visit of Tenryu-ji, we walked down to Togetsu-kyo bridge (渡月橋)

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We did not book a hotel to stay as we found this may be a good experience to live in some guesthouses in Kyoto. We picked Waraku (和樂庵). This guesthouse is over 100 years old and it was highly rated by Taiwanese. It is a small house where people will share a room with different people, they have to share the same toilet and bathroom as well. They only have four private rooms and we made the reservation a few month ago. Hence we need not to sleep with others in the same room. The room is decent and nice, quite classic.