Japan, day 8: Fushimi Inari Taisha and Nara

Fushimi Inari Taisha is a famous shrine with a thousand red torii gates. Well, maybe not exactly a thousand, but it certainly feels like it. (Correction: I just looked it up online, and apparently there is approximately ten thousand torii gates... oh, my! I certainly didn't walk through all of them.) Anyway, we did walk through quite a number of red torii gates, and took pictures of some of them - a process complicated by the fact that there were about ten thousand other tourists there at the moment, each of them seemingly trying to take a selfie with each of the torii gates. 

So here we are, approaching... 

This is not even a shrine, just a two-storied gate. But notice two fox statues in front of it, to either side. Fushimi Inari is the main shrine dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice, foxes, fertility, agriculture, and prosperity, among other things. Foxes are thought to be Inari's messengers, resulting in many fox statues across the shrine grounds. 

Being that foxes are one of my favorite animals (along with hedgehogs, owls, koalas, and a few others), I took quite a bunch of photos of the Inari foxes, and here are some of them.

But back to the gates. Here is a schematic map of the grounds...

...  and here is another, posted at the point where the first one ends (with a single gate to the right of a big yellow tree - if you look closely, you can see the yellow tree and single gate next to it in the second map as well).

I think we went a bit further than that point, but we didn't go all the way to the top of the mountain. This is what it all looks like in real life.

First, another gate with guardian foxes, wearing aprons...

... next to it, you can buy a little torii gate (apparently they are called torii Ema) for Y1000, write your wish and your name on it and hang it on a special fence somewhere. You can also take it home with you. (We didn't do it.)

This is where the first row of gates starts...

... and continues, and continues...

Then, the double row starts (you take the one on the right)...

... and keeps going, and going.

At some point, as the gates become less dense, there is a trail up and to the right. We weren't sure what was there, but took it anyway because very few other people were going. It was a welcome respite.

Apparently, that was Okusha shrine. Now back at the trail of gates...

... and eventually we come to a T-junction, where you return by the different path that you came from (and this is approximately where the second map is posted).

Never mind, we still go forward...

... and come to an area with many little shrines (and many-many foxes), and a pond...

This is probably the Shin-ike pond. I think we turned back somewhere around here, or soon after. More gates...

... and we are out!

But this is just the beginning of our day. Because now we go to Nara!

The reason we planned it like this: Alex read somewhere that trip to Nara is a half-day, and Fushimi Inari Taisha is close to the train station that takes you to Nara. Want to find out what went wrong? Read on...

First, we took a train to Nara and - because by then it was already lunchtime - had lunch at an udon place. Udon is the third type of Japanese noodles - soba is buckwheat, while both ramen and udon are wheat-based, but they have different texture and flavor. Udon is thicker than the other two types and has a signature chewy texture.

The place I picked for lunch was about 8 minutes walk from the Nara station, but then we had to wait - they were busy recovering after a large group - and overall, we wasted a lot of time, unfortunately. Then we came back to the station and took a train further North, because Alex discovered that there is a very old wooden temple a bit to the North from Nara, Horyu-ji Temple. It is not part of the Nara park, you have to take a train (3 stops) and a bus to go there.

Horyu-ji is a Buddhist temple with some of the world's oldest wooden buildings. They are beautiful!

However, by the time we finished with it and took the bus and train back to Nara, it was 5pm, and the temples and shrines in the park were closing... our usual story... we didn't get into a single one of them. On the plus side, Nara deer don't close (or go to bed) at 5pm, and so we got to see and even pet them. 

And so I didn't feel like it was a complete loss. It's just that everything takes longer than we expect. 

By the end of the day, we were too exhausted to look for new adventures, so we just had dinner at our hotel. Truth be told, everything was delicious, so no regrets!

> Day 9