 |
| View from Umeda Sky Garden (with the Gate Tower Building in the background!) |
After quite a few long years away, I just came back from my first trip to West Japan in about six years. This was the first time I'd been to the Kansai Region in a long time, and my first time there with family. My fam didn't come visit me for the years I was living in Osaka - my mom is the very definition of a nervous traveller. It took a lot of convincing to finally get her to go, but now that both of my parents are retired, we'd been urging them to travel while they were still relatively healthy. And so, I planned and executed as perfect a 2-week Japan vacation as I could manage, starting in Osaka, of course.
It was so satisfying showing them all the things I love about the Kansai area. I was a little selfish in cutting Tokyo time SO short that they barely saw any of it at all (1 day in Atami, 3 days in Tokyo), but there's so much to see and do just in Osaka and Kyoto alone (never mind all the great places I would have loved to take them in Nara, Wakayama, Shiga, Kobe, et al) that even the week and a half spent there wasn't enough.
Not much had changed, in the places we went, except of course for the extreme number of tourists. On one level, I hate contributing to the overtourism problem. We skipped most places like Kinkakuji, Gion and Kyomizudera that would have been staples to take guests to ten years ago, in the pre-Instagram world. I tried to go off the beaten path when I could. When I saw the chaos of people at Fushimi Inari (when I lived there, there was never any significant number of people on the hiking trails, no matter what time of day we visited), I had tried to prepare myself for the fact that it had become one of the #1 destinations in Kyoto, but it was still mind-boggling to see. The days of using Fushimi Inari's trails as a way to get your daily exercise in (yes, I tried this in 2008 or so, since Keihan Fushimi was just a hop, skip and a jump away from my home station) are long gone. I did get up at 7 AM and hit the trail for old time's sake, and I mostly avoided the crowds, but I had to turn back at the pond, since we were due to move on to our next destination that morning. On that same day, I encountered my first extreme shinkansen delay - the eastbound Tokaido was 30 minutes late leaving Kyoto. Couldn't believe that happened on the day of my parents' very first and only shinkansen trip.
I have a lot to say about the trip, but not enough space to say it all in one post, so I'll divide it into a few entries. I hope you'll enjoy them.
