Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 12 - Hiking Pilgrimage

Our adventure for today took us to Hieizan and Enryakuji, the temple complex at its top. Hieizan is in a little town called Sakamoto, which has its own man hole cover design just like every other city in Japan so far:

I have kind of been collecting pictures of them, but haven't put every one on the blog, something I might rectify one day.

To get to the top of the mountain involved Japan's longest cable car track (or so the recorded voice claimed unless I misheard). It was only a ten minute ride. It had nice views though.

Then we walked for a bit before coming to the entrance of to To-do area of the complex. I couldn't remember if we needed to pay admittance, but it turns out that we did a whole 550 yen. 

We started off viewing what the brocher told us was the most important temple on the mountain, Konpon Chu-do. 

This was one of the few temples that were actually allowed inside of. We weren't supposed to take pictures, but before I remembered that I took one bad photo:

I'd like to mention that it looks much better in person.

Rich and I ran up a bit staircase and then climbed this ladder thing:

To end up at another little alter that didn't allow photos. But it was more fun to do than see, so you aren't missing much.

We didn't spend very long in the first complex, partly because we climed a hill to early and no one wanted to go back down to see stuff, so we moved on to the Amida-do:

None of the buildings were open, but they were pretty to look at. They are some of the newest buildings on the mountain, being built within the last century. Other temples, like the Konpon Chu-do, have been around for the last 1200 years (though who knows how many times it was repaired or rebuilt).

We wandered onward and found a long set of stairs going down (we had been going up all this time). We left my mom (because of her knee) and visited the Sai-to complex.

There was some sort of lecture or something going on in the last temple, so we weren't able to look inside. At this point we were fairly templed out though, so I don't think either of us cared.

We returned to my mom to continue our trek to the cable car on the other side of the mountain. On our way we met a nice gentleman who practiced his English conversational skills with us. His name was Susume Tanaka and he lives in Kyoto working as a landlord (I think) though he used to teach math to Jr high kids. 

The other side of the mountain had some excellent views of Kyoto:

On the ride down we asked Tanaka-San hi feh could recommend a good yakiniku place in Kyoto and he gave us the name of a place he said was cheap and tasty. Sadly, after walking 20 minutes from the station we discovered they didn't open until 5 and it was 3:40 when we arrived. This was supposed to be lunch, but by the time we finally got food in Shinsaibashi (Osaka), it was after 5 anyway. So we chose an all you can eat yakiniku place, which was the right decision. My phone died while we were trying to find it, so I will ask Rich for pictures to post later.

It was a long day, but pretty fun.