a collection of travels

So following my last post about my experiences in Kyoto, I thought I would continue with my story of what happened for the rest of the day. After being exhausted after walking around the Nison-in Temple and Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, we began to look for ideas of things to do on our way back to Kyoto station. Nara park was on our list of potenital days anyway, but we were not sure if we would have enough time to do everything we wanted to! Luckily we had plenty of time left in the day, so we looked up directions and made our way to catch the Kintetsu express train to Nara. Nara park is only a short walk (about 5 minutes) from the Kintetsu Nara Station and you can definitely tell you are in the right place by the amount of deer roaming about!! We found it a little difficult finding the place where you buy the food for the deer, but there are stalls all around the park selling the food and we found some eventually! We enjoyed walking around between feeding de...

When I was travelling in Japan, I planned almost every second and I was desperate not to miss anything. However, one of our outings was more spontaneous and our exploring lead to a really nice discovery. On August 5th 2016, we decided to go to Kyoto and hopped on the shinkansen in the hopes of seeing the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove. We took a train from Kyoto station to Saga-Arashiyama, which only took 16 minutes and was free with our JR passes. We walked for a little while from the station and we found the bamboo forest. It was beautiful to look at, but once you've walked through and taken a few pictures there isn't a lot else to do. It was a lot smaller than I expected and it was packed with tourists. I got my instagram worthy shot and then we decided to look elsewhere. It is my belief that when you travel, you find the interesting stuff when you get lost and it's all part of the fun (or maybe that's just a lie to excuse my disorganisation and poo...