'Clear Water'

Our second day in Kyoto kicked off with a trip southeast of the city to Fushimi, an elaborate network of shrines built into the hillside, all linked by an incredible number of bright orange 'Torii' gates. Scarlett started counting them but rather wisely gave up pretty quickly. They just went on and on.

What I find most amazing about Fushimi is how ancient it is, some five or six centuries older than any of the other places we had thus far visited in Kyoto. While Europeans were stumbling around blindly in the Dark Ages, bumping into stuff, the Japanese were building these remarkable monuments.

They had good reason to; they needed to get the attention of the gods. You can certainly understand why Shintoism, and animism in general, developed in Japan, with nature as beautiful and as terrible as it is here. Equally, you can understand why virtually all Japanese would consider themselves to be Shinto believers today. Nature hasn't become any less beautiful or terrible since.

Later, we visited Sanjusangen-do temple (got that?) in the centre of Kyoto (which is quite a journey - it's easy to forget that this city is about the same size as Birmingham, if rather less bleak). This temple houses 1001 statues of the Buddhist deity Kannon, built in order to protect the earth, and arranged in seemingly endless rows. Moving down the hall, looking into their eyes, it is impossible not to be moved, on some level, by this astonishing display, if only by thinking about the people who sculpted them and the centuries that have passed since.

There's quite some contrast between the beautiful statues, shrines and temples in Kyoto and the dreariness of Protestant churches. The emphasis here seems to be on creating an external environment designed to foster individual spirituality, and this seems to me to be the right approach. Standing on the hilltop at Fushimi shrine and looking down amongst the gates and shrines, why wouldn't you believe?

Our final destination of the day was Kiyomizu-dera, one of Kyoto's picture postcards - an enormous pagoda above an apparently famous wooden terrace that overlooks the city. We drank from a fount of clear water that supposedly cures all ailments, although I feel this claim was somewhat undermined by the fact that we took our cups out of an ultraviolet steriliser. Surely you don't have to worry about germs at the fountain of youth?

So that was Kyoto. It was really good. Next time on the Bayfield Travel Blog, I'll update you on what we got up to at Himeji and Nara. We sure are some crazy kids.

- Adam