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Arrived at kyoto to discover id left my camera in Horoshima!! Only realised in the morning and luckily an extremely helpful receptionist helped me sort it out. Ended up booking train back to H, thank GOD for the rail pass! Def got money's worth. Was worried I wouldn't get seat cos v last minute but there are non-reseved carriages which aren't normally full, and i joked that I could just sit in the train toilet instead and the receptionist laughed and said at least the seat will be heated ha.
It only got better though... once i'd retrieved my camera from Hiroshima and got laughed at again.. I headed back to Kyoto. On both journeys I had one change over, but on the way back I got off to change but somehow forgot that I needed to get on another train, so just wandered around the train station looking at stalls for a while. It wasnt until half an hour later that I realised what ha happened and that I'd completely missed my connection! Again, thankfully for the rail pass, I was able to get the next train an hour later for free... why do I do this?!
When I finally made it back I headed straight to the Fushimi Inari Taisha
Shrine, as they don't tend to have a closing time unlike temples. This was amazing! It was made up of thousands of orange painted torii (traditiomal japanese gate) inscribed down one side in Japanese characters, marking a 3k pathway you could walk through.
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As I'd got there fairly late in the day (and as it was the down season) it was pretty empty and although this started off as a good thing, once it had turned dark and crows started calling it just got a bit spooky. The walkway was lit up but all signposts were in Japanese and so I had no idea whether I was going the right way as every now and again the path would split off in two and you'd have to choose which walkway to follow! The route was entirely steps so it was pretty tiring and on either side it was dense with trees and so hard to gauge where about exactly on the route you were.. A man running passed me twice, I have NO idea how he kept going as It was fairly steep! There were lots of posters warning about wild monkeys which I found kind of funny as the advice was to "not make eye contact and if they approach pretend to throw rocks at them"!!
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After about 2 hours I finally made it to the end and caught a train back to the hostel.
In the common room I started chatting to two lovely Taiwanese girls who were very funny and insisted for about an hour that I ate one of their egg rolls as apparently it is a traditional food in Taiwan? That and pineapple cake apparently.I also met a guy called Alex in my dorm who's from Dusseldorf and although he is leaving tomorrow for Tokyo I found out he's vegan and so were planning to meet up in Tokyo in a couple days for food and karaoke!
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