Arashiyama 嵐山, Kyoto

Arashiyama is a place that I quite look forward going to after seeing the gorgeous pictures on the internet. It's not very far from Kyoto but you have to take the correct train to get there, as in take the rapid train instead of the local one. We took the JR Sagono Line and stopped at JR Saga Arashiyama which is around 5 minutes walk into the town. Some of the places that we managed to visit are:

Tenryuji Temple

The entrance fee to the temple is 500 yen for garden and additional 100 yen for the temple. We only went into the garden and it is one of the must see garden here. Beautiful, scenic and serene, just like a Japanese zen garden.

Bamboo Groves

From the temple, it was about 10 minutes walk to the Bamboo Groves and it's easy to get into by just following the signboard. I read from some forum saying that it is difficult to find the entrance, but for us it was quite easy to locate. Although the bamboo groves is something I really look forward to, but I don't really enjoy that much as it was crowded and difficult to get a good photo of just the bamboo groves alone without tourist lurking in my photo. Luckily, I spotted a tiny spot to take some good potrait shots of us which I discovered later to be someone's home.


Nisonin Temple

After the bamboo groves, we continued walking around Arashiyama following the map provided to us. We were trying to locate and find out how far the Saga- Toriimoto Preserved street and asked an elderly Japanese man for directions. Bad move. He is nice and accomodating but lack of English hampered communication between both of us. Finally, we gave up and just walked and walked until we saw a few temples and decided to go into one that looks niced from outside. Nisonin temple required 500 yen to enter but the lack of tourist really brought out my inner photography madness, this time for potrait shooting, haha. We had multiple shots sitting at the stairs and I can already imagine, this temple is perfect during autumn. Even during sakura season, it's really beautiful.


Togetsukyo Bridge

After Nisonin, we decided to turn back and walked towards the bridge, famous for the sakura trees lining along the bridge. We just chill out and relax here, people watching and sunset watching. Time to hit Kyoto after feeling some cold chill.

This the map I used for the planning of my Arashiyama trip