Fushimi Inari Taisha

I was so excited our first full day in Kyoto to go to Fushimi Inari Shrine. It's also nicknamed, thousand torii gates, it should be thousands of torii gates. We started the day taking the bus back to Kyoto station and then taking the train only 2 stops to the shrine. Sounds like a hassel, but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy to get around Kyoto.

This is the entrance to the shrine, I love the brightly orange colored gates and buildings.

And here's the entrance to the thousands of torii gates, all the way up to the top of the mountain.

It's a bit crowded at the bottom, that's where most people stay, not everyone hikes through all the torii gates to the top. We weren't planning on it at first, but just started walking. It's quite the experience to wander through all the lovely torii gates.

The back of the gates are inscribed with the donor's name and date. So some of the gates are new and have been recently donated and some are older.

Instead of hiking right up to the top through the torii gates, we took a detour, and hiked up the back of the mountain and then came down through the gates.

We saw lots of bamboo! It's hard to say how amazing the bamboo forest are and it's hard to capture how cool they are in picture, they are just cool!

There were a couple of shrines along the way with what looked like graveyards, but not sure exactly what it was.

As we were walking along we saw a man working on chipping away at a wooden person, he was very nice and let us take a picture. He spoke good English and we had a nice conversation. This is one of my favorite things about travel, all the nice people you meet. It really restores your faith in humanity.

More bamboo!

After a bit of steep hiking we made it to the top of the mountain as it's called. We didn't stay too long before walking back down. It's nice at the top but the real treat is walking through all the torii gates.

A great view of Kyoto.