We started a very cloudy gray day two of the Kyoto trip at Kiyomizu-Dera which happens to open at 6:00am. Hoping to avoid the immense crowds that it tends to attract later in the day we arrived at 7:00 and had the place to ourselves.
Next, we stopped at the Imperial Household Agency hoping to get a tour at the Katsura gardens, but were informed that all tours were booked until Wednesday. Instead we wondered the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace.
The third stop was Sanjusangen-do a hall which contains 1000 identical statues that cannot be photographed (check the photo on the Wikipedia link above). This was my first visit to Sanjusangen-do and it quickly became one of my top 10 favorite attractions in Japan. 
Just before lunch we made a stop at Tofuku-ji, another of the a la cart temple complexes, planning to see the moss checkerboard garden, but unable to find it we ended up at the gravel checkerboard garden instead. The most amusing park of Tofuku-ji is that free parking is located within the temple complex this meant that I had to drive through one of the old temple gates.
After lunch we finished the day at Fushimi Inari. This time I tried to pay more attention to the variety of fox statues along the tori gate route.
2 comments:
Did you see the tree with the cancer in the Imperial gardens? It had been cut open sometime before I was there in 2003.
...I didn't see the Cancer tree, nor could I find any information about it online
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