Kyoto: A Day of Shrines,Temples, and One Kindred Spirit

Yesterday was our grand tour of Kyoto’s most famous sacred sites — the kind of day that proves you can rack up 20,000 steps without even noticing.

We started at the iconic Fushimi Inari Shrine, with its seemingly endless tunnels of vermilion torii gates winding up the hillside. The air was thick with the scent of cedar and the soft percussion of wooden prayer plaques swaying in the breeze. We didn’t climb all the way to the top — a combination of time constraints and, let’s be honest, quad preservation — but even the lower sections felt like walking through a living postcard.

From there, it was on to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, perched high on the hill with sweeping views over Kyoto. The temple’s wooden stage juts out above the hillside, offering a panoramic view of tiled rooftops and the green folds of the surrounding mountains.

On the way down from Kiyomizu-dera, the mood shifted. The path wound us through the vast Ōtani Cemetery, a sprawling hillside of stone markers and lanterns. It was serene and humbling — the kind of place that instinctively makes you slow your steps and lower your voice. Some markers were adorned with flowers, others with food or drink offerings. One in particular caught my eye: a single beer can resting beside the stone. Without knowing a single thing about the man buried there, I turned to Jen and said, “I’m sure we would have gotten along.

Kyoto’s blend of the spiritual, the scenic, and the everyday is impossible to describe in just one post — but let’s just say the day left us happily tired, well-fed, and with one more story to tell.

If you’d like, I can also make you a matching Facebook teaser that hints at the beer-can moment without giving the whole thing away — it would definitely draw readers into clicking through to the full blog post. Want me to do that?