Thursday - March 03, 2005

Japan: Kyoto

We are scheduled to stop at two ports in Japan, Nagasaki and Osaka. Because the historic and fascinating city of Kyoto is so close to Osaka, Mike and I decided to do our own overland trip to Kyoto for two nights rather than spending the time in the two ports. We booked a room for a pretty good price at the hotel attached to the new train station in central Kyoto, checked the train schedules, and then set off on our little adventure.

Mike has never been to Japan before, so I floated the idea of us taking off for a few days on our own and spending some quality time together in Kyoto, a city I love. We did our homework in making a hotel reservation and looking up train schedules and decided that we could do this with a little bit of effort. So I started going to the rudimentary Japanese lessons being offered by the Japanese hostess on board the ship and managed to squeeze in four lessons, enough to brush up on the Japanese basics I had learned, lo these many years ago in university. And it came in handy in a number of situations.

We packed an overnight bag and headed directly to the train station once the ship docked in Nagasaki. Our plan was to take a high-speed train to the town of Hakata, where we would connect to the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto. The first train was a pleasant surprise in that it went much faster than I had thought it would (about 125 miles per hour) and it was very elegant. The floors in the cars were all varnished parquet wood and the seats were black leather. There was a not a scrap of graffiti or a torn seat to be seen. We arrived in Hakata in no time and had just 7 minutes to make our connection. We had a small delay trying to figure out which of our three tickets we were supposed to run through the mechanical gate (all three at once as it turned out), but once a guard sorted that out for us, we hopped on the bullet train with a minute or so to spare and then we were off. And, boy, were we off. That train is well named because we took off like a bat out of hell - all 16 cars! You think you are really flying, yet you can still feel the train picking up speed as it leaves the town. It is a remarkable piece of engineering because not only is it incredibly fast (over 300 km/h which is about 190 mph), but it doesn't have to slow down for curves; it just banks right into them. Even the first "slow" train did this.

We crossed half of Japan in just 2 and a half hours, and were blown away by the new railway station complex when we arrived in Kyoto. It is a marvel of steel girders and glass, with elevators that reach to the sky and overhead walkways that let you cross from one end of the station to the other, as though you are a bird. The Hotel Granvia is attached to one end of the station, and offers the height of good service. It has something like 11 restaurants and 5 bars, and a few are even affordable for mere mortals. Our room was very relaxing and comfortable, and offered a few gimmicks that I have never seen in western hotels, such as a heated toilet seat and a section of mirror in the bathroom that never fogged up. We also had a great view over the city from our 11th floor windows.

Japanese emperors lived for 1,000 years in Kyoto and it is still a city where beauty and tradition flourish. Besides its many temples, palaces, and gardens, it also has pockets of the city where you can wander through markets, past wooden houses with latticed windows, and see women and geisha in their kimono. We had roughly two days to see as much as could and we made good use of our time. Luckily, it was cool but sunny, so the weather was perfect for sightseeing. We were too early to see cherry trees in bloom but we did visit a temple that had a grove of plum trees in blossom. During our stay, we visited the magnificent Kinkakuji Temple, which is all covered in gold leaf; Sanjusangendo Temple, famous for its 1,001 golden statues of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy; the Nijo Palace, home of the Shogun, with its Nightingale Floor, which was designed to squeak to warn of intruders; we had lunch in a tiny noodle shop where the noodles are made by hand and no one speaks English; and we wandered through lovely, peaceful Japanese gardens with camellia trees in bloom. We took the bus everywhere and had no difficulty using our trusty bus map of the city and our 500 yen day pass. And the Japanese people are friendly and willing to help anyone who seems to be showing signs of being lost or confused. One man insisted on walking us two blocks to the bus stop we needed and then asking a man waiting there to be sure we got on the correct bus.

All too soon, it was time to get the train to Osaka to join back up with the ship. Now we were old hands at using the system and breezed on to our train. When we arrived in Osaka, we discovered that we needed to use the subway to get to the port and we had to transfer along the way, but we managed that quite nicely too. We were quite proud of ourselves for the way we got around, and now feel confident that we could manage a holiday in Japan for a few weeks. And we are both anxious to go back, either in the spring or the fall, or both, to see more of the sites that we just didn't have time for on this short trip. We were warned that we might fall prey to the disease "templeitis constipatis" that can affect many of those who visit Kyoto, but we didn't notice a single symptom. We loved it!