We went on a Hop on Hop off bus tour around Kyoto yesterday. Not the best way of touring a city, I’ll admit, especially as it was Monday and a lot of the sites were closed for a holiday or maybe they just close on Mondays. But it’s great way of getting a feel for a city and staying warm. That last bit, staying warm is particularly important at the moment as it’s been bitterly cold for several days. I have always believed people when they said the humidity in Ireland makes the low temperatures we experience feel worse than the frighteningly low temperatures you hear of in other countries. I no longer believe them. It was a gentle 5 degrees celsius here today and I thought I would literally freeze. I am very sorry I used that phrase at home where I was never in danger of freezing so it’ll be like I cried wolf but it’s woeful cold here, I am not lying.

So we took the tour to keep warm, basically. And we were warm and toasty inside the bus. One of the best things about this mode of tourist experience is that you from time to time get off and wander around an interesting location. A castle, maybe? A temple, perhaps? A shrine, perchance? Or what about the Imperial Palace? I was very tempted, fortunately it was one of the places that were closed, no hopping off for us. We stayed for the whole journey, marvelling at the time keeping of the driver. Now, I can’t say the traffic was heavy but there were red lights and pedestrians crossing when he wanted to turn left at a red light (all legal in Japan) so it was steady traffic and yet as I consulted the brochure showing the forecast timing of each bus stop pick up, he was always on time. Always. It was possibly the most exciting thing about the tour, waiting to see if he’d make it. He came close once but only close. It must be wonderful to live here and know the buses and trains will always be on time.

We loved having such a great transport system. We never needed to be on time anywhere… oh wait we did when we were going on the Shinkansen our tickets were reserved and timed. But with our homeland experience of a notional train and bus schedule we arrived more than an hour early. But back to the transport, it is so useful to have a rail transport system that goes from the airport to the city, we really should think about something similar in Dublin or maybe Cork? If it could be in place by the time we get home later this week all the better.

Anyway back to our bus tour, it became obvious about halfway around that there were far too many temples, shrines, museums, markets and other amazingly beautiful places to visit in Kyoto. We would stop at a shrine and see at least two impressive rooftops (a tell tales sign) in the vicinity. Then we could see a passenger asking the conductor for directions to the proposed site from the brochure and be pointed in a completely different direction to the impressive rooftops we were looking at. I did mean to google a list of the temple, shrines and museums in Kyoto and if I do that I’ll include a screenshot of it here…

I got as far as googling how many? and there’s 1600 temples and 400 shrines, right. The Hop on Hop off tour is now sounding like the best idea we had. We’re obviously settling into tourist life fine and there’s nothing we need to change. The photos perhaps? Yes they are a little indistinct through the bus window and behind other people’s heads with the high back seats and all but small price to pay for the warmth. It’s freezing out there (not literally).

But then today we went to two absolutely must get off the bus places. We didn’t go on a bus we took the normal train (have I mentioned how great the transport system is here in Kyoto? It was great in Osaka too. And in Hiroshima where they have Streetcars or trams) There’ll be better photos tomorrow… all going well.