I’m going to be straight up and say i don’t know how I feel about Kyoto. The best parts of Kyoto, the temples and historic areas are overrun with tourism. Now of course there are some temples that are less frequented and an early bird beats the hoards, but its hard for me to genuinely love the place for now. The public transport system is somewhat disjointed and there are private rail lines running across the city that never really have convenient transfer points. The first place is kind of evidence of that catching a bus from central Kyoto to Arashiyama, a place with a direct metro line to Osaka, but not to the much closer Kyoto.
There was a few nice temples out at Arashiyama and it very much had a rergional feel right on the outskirts of the city. Its famous for the Bamboo forest you can walk through, but I found that a disappointment and not because of the numbers of toruists, but because it was kind of over designed and lost the feel of a natural bamboo forest. The town had lovely streets as well, especially the side streets. The bus wasn;t fun so ended up catching a train, walking 15 minutes and then catching another train.
In the early evening I headed to another popular location, Fushimi Inari. A temple with a long pathway under bright red Torii. Another influencer and instagram hotspot, but by 6pm, it was busy, the temple had mostly closed along with the stores, but it wasn’t crowded and hence a reasonably pleasant experience. Kyoto is popular and I found early mornings or later in the day was the only bearable time for me.
My second day was devoted to museums and given how close the Kyoto Railway Museum was to my hotel I decided to check out its vast array of trains and everything to do with trains, including working models of a railway crossing, pantograph, and a model railway train simulation, where you are required to drive the train to the instructions….. the problem is they were all in Japanese. They had a few older shinkansen bullet trains and when I went outside I counted no less than a dozen steam trains, one of which was working.
In the afternoon I was lucky enough to win the ticket lottery to visit the Nintendo Museum. Its crazy to think this was my higlight of Kyoto, given the history that is all around the city, but it really was. Nintendo though started in 1889 making Hanafuda cards (which they still do today). These cards have 48 in a deck, 4 for each month of the year and feature flowers and plants. One of the card games you can play with them is called Koi-koi, its a fun game of making sets of cards, like collecting all the one month, or collecting certain special cards. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that they started producing video games and game systems. The Nintendo Entertainment System took off in 1985 with Mario Bros. and the rest is history.
The upper level of the museum has all the things they’ve made over the years, like consoles, cards and oother fun things to play at home, one of which is a ping pong ball thrower so you can play baseball in your living room in the 1960’s. Better still they had these set up downstairs to play games on. They had all sorts of fun things to do downstairs like a light gun shooting gallery, easily the most popular, but not to blow my own trumpet, they had “Game & Watch” simulators as well, which I got a perfect score on in the 2 minute simulation. The Game & Watch were the old black LCD handheld games popular in the early 80’s. Each one device only played one game and they were simple games that got faster and faster to increase difficulty.
The last day in Kyoto ibit the bullet got up early and headed to the historical Gion district. I’m glad I went early, the streets were fairly empty at 7am in the morning and I was able to wander around and just savour some serenity. There were still the annoying influencer types plus its seems like Kimono rentals and photography session is the in thing in Kyoto. I visited the awesome Kodaiji temple with a cemetry, bamboo forest and a tea room. It was relatively quiet with only a handful of visitors when it opened at 9am.
Would I come back to Kyoto? I’d probably come back in winter, I can’t imagine how crowded this place would get during cherry blossum season, that would be my worst nightmare. Kyoto has a lot of beauty, it was just hard to appreciate. There are many beautiful temples to visit also and some gardens I didn’t get time to visit in the north of the city. I also feel there is a lot of beauty in Japan that can be found off the beaten path and any future trip to Japan is likely to be to less visited places.