Tofuku-ji and Fushimi-Inari Shrine

 Another early morning to get to the shine before it gets too crowded with tourists. There’s the walk up the hill to the entrance of the shrine. The little street is crowded, mostly with Westerners, anxious to experience the shine. We get to the shine and start walking, up up. I had thought that there were just a small series of the red gates but I was wrong, there were gates going all The way to the top of the mountain and back. In between the gates were rest stops…some had cafés, others were shrines. In spite of the crowds, sometimes we were alone in a series of gates and sometimes we were in a crowd.

Entrance

Kozue in front of gate series

Map. So let me tell you, I was huffing and puffing the whole way. I think I had a cold, or allergies, not sure, But regardless it was a real challenge for me to continue walking up the hill early in the morning. During this time I was resolving to improve my physical Fitness when I get home.

We ran into a kitty cat who looked much like one of my former cats on the way up the hill. She knows this was a good way to collect treats I think

Uninhabited section, Kozue posing.

Hard to see in photo, but the image on the fountain was of a fox. The fox is the symbol of the shrine and there are images everywhere.

After getting just beyond the crossroads, we ended up getting lost in a maze of shrines and ended up on a path that turned out to be wrong. We decided not to finish walking the temple and continued on the wrong path where we encountered a Zen Temple.

If you want to know more, here is the Wikipedia citation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dfuku-ji

So we stumbled upon Tofuku-join the way to the train station. The grounds were completely empty so we decided to give it a try.

ToFuku-ji was a real highlight for me. It is a huge temple complex, found it forever ago, the oldest zen Temple in Japan. We were essentially the only visitors for the first 30 minutes. It was very strange but I suddenly decided that I needed to write haiku, the views and vistas were so inspiring.

The main temple, built in the 700s.

This covered bridge connected the main temple grounds with another section containing gardens and more structures.

The photos below depict some of the lovely gardens we saw. The temple complex left us with the most lovely “zen” feeling, it was quite remarkable.

T