Japan day 12: Fushimi Inari-taisha Shrine and Tofukuji Temple

For our first day in Kyoto we decided to visit Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine and walk up Inari mountain to see all the little shrines along the trail. This is the main shrine. The bright orange is consistent throughout all the Inari mountain shrines and all of them share similar designs. 

To get to the top of the moutain you go up steps through 10,000 of these Torii gates. There are thousands of steps too and it takes around 2 hours to get to the top. We hadn't planned ahead for this, but we were all determined to get to the top and follow the trail back down. The well preserved gates date all the way back to 711 A.D. and while most are painted bright orange (seemingly repainted fairly regularly) there are some plain stone gates.

Along the trail there are lots of little side paths with beautiful scenery. It allows you to get away from the crowd a little, although understandably there were less and less people as we neared the top.

On our way back a couple of us decided we'd walk back to the hotel and had a little bit of time to look at Tofukuji temple. Just like Fushimi Inari-taisha, it was a massive area filled with buildings which are part of a school for the Rinzai sect of zen Buddhism. It was originally built in 1239, but after burning down was rebuilt using the same plans in the 15th century.

What appealed to me was the amount of detail put into the roofs and the contrast between the white of the building and the dark wood. There was also the size of some of the buildings. It was hard to capture just how large some of them were.

Even the smaller structures shared the same detail. I also loved the bright red leaves around along with the neat hedges.