We walk out of Inari Station, and straight away we see the most amazing torii. Kate stands in front of the gate for perspective. It’s huge and once again I am pinching myself that we are here and I am seeing this with my own eyes. If you haven’t noticed by now, I walk around Japan in amazement pretty much all the time.
We walk up through the Romon gate.
We find that there is an area for us to buy a Homa wood stick which we can write our wishes on. The stick then gets burned as part of the Hitakisai festival on the following day. My wish was for wealth and happiness. I’m not too fussed about the wealth part, but I am big on the happiness.
We start walking through the shrine. There’s a map and I don’t think it’s quite to scale as I say to Kate that it should only take us 20 minutes or so to get to the top.
We've been walking for a while, about 30 minutes from the map and we think we should be there soon. We're not. But we do find an area just over halfway up the mountain with a little shop and the ice creams are selling like hotcakes! There's not a bad view of Kyoto from here either!
We stop to buy a drink, but we start off again, still going up and up. We joke about the standards in Japan and how they are non-existent for stairs as it feels like every stair is a different height and length.
Are we there yet....
After 50 minutes, we finally reach the top. (Sorry Kate, I really did think it was only going to take 20 minutes all up!)
And then we make our way down to the bottom. It is so much cooler on this side of the mountain.
It’s amazing how there are little stores along the path through the shrine.
And once we finally get closer to the bottom, we decide to test out a vending machine. Of course I choose Pocari Sweat, purely because it has sweat in the name. We also get a steamed bun to try out. We have no idea what is in it but it tastes pretty good.
We check Google maps and decide there’s no point catching a train and that we would walk the 20 minutes to our next destination Tofukuji.
