March 31, 2010: Kyoto III

An early wakeup on our second morning in Kyoto gave me my first opportunity to do any real birdwatching in Japan. A pre-breakfast wander along the river and through the grounds of the nearby Shimagamo Shrine resulted in around fifteen new species, including Japanese grosbeak, Japanese wagtail and Hawfinch. The shrine itself was quite impressive - another of Kyoto's many UNESCO world heritage sites.

The main outing for the day was to the Arashiyama area, a short train ride north-west of the city. Getting off the train we aimlessly followed the crowd down to the Oi River and the famous Togetsu-kyo bridge.

The mountain backdrop distracted us from the touristy vibe of the bridge area, with bursts of cherry blossom flaring out of the forest.

A quick poke around the stalls near the river (no mochi, lots of street-meat), and we decided to turn back and get our temple on at Tenruy-ji, the other side of the train station. This zen temple is particularly famous for its rock garden, which dates from the 14th century. It's very peaceful and calming (if you can tune out all the camera sounds and noisy kids).

Despite being founded in the 1300s, the temple itself is only a century or so old. Like so many of the temples we visited, the buildings have been periodically destroyed by fires or floods over the centuries.

We paused in the temple grounds for a quick snack, picked up from one of the touristy stalls near the train station.

These yatsuhashi are on sale everywhere in Kyoto. The little triangles have a vaguely mochi-like texture and the fillings included red bean paste and sweet berry flavoured mush. Not bad.

Re-energised, we headed for the most famous sight in the area: the Sagano bamboo grove. Tucked behind Tenryu-ji, the bamboo forest covers 16 square kilometres and is quite hypnotic.

Just outside the bamboo grove is a little train station with a couple of stalls, including this guy:

happily frying up fresh mochi and serving it up to all comers (120 円 each, $1.40). Who could resist? Especially when our lunch plan (another tofu restaurant) turned out to be closed all day.

Filled with mochi-power we kept on walking, heading for a stroll through Kamayama-koen, a park beside the river, with a nice lookout.

Having given up on our tofu lunch plan, we did a quick scan of the town for other vego options, and found nowhere particularly promising. So instead of just eating tons of mochi each for the rest of the day, we jumped back on the train and headed for downtown Kyoto and the Nishiki market.

The market is covered and 400 metres long, filled with small stallholders selling everything from pickles and vegies, to knives and and tofu. It's a wonderful place to just wander around explore, with every stall selling something intriguing or delicious looking.

Our main purpose here was eating - we needed something to tide us over until dinner time. I started with a freshly made seven-spice rice cracker from Mochiyaki Sembei, which was a taste and texture sensation.

Cindy and I were both intrigued by the big sign promising 'tofu doughnuts'. These turn out to be basically doughnuts cooked using soy milk rather than dairy milk (and thus quite possibly vegan - we didn't ask about the egg situation. For 250 円 (~$3), you get ten of these little suckers:

They could probably have used a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar, but freshly cooked they were still an amazing treat.

The food market eventually runs into Teramaki shopping mall, an old street that was once chock full of temples and is now a covered mall with loads of sneaker shops, restaurants and video game arcades.

Like all of Kyoto though, there are always temples lurking - something like 12 are tucked in behind narrow gaps in the shop-fronts.

With night falling, we set out to find dinner, heading up to the river and some of Kyoto's best cherry blossoms.

name="siesta" The venue for dinner was the trendy-sounding Cafe la Siesta, a veg-friendly bar and cafe fitted out with tremendously cool retro video games.

Even the little menu holder is Nintendo-themed.

While the drinks menu lists a wide range of game-themed cocktails. I couldn't resist a 'highscore' (white rum with apple juice and mint, 680 円/$8), while Cindy opted for an 'invader' (rum, lychee and sherbert, 750 円/$9).

You can't quite make it out in the picture, but the yellow ice-cubes in Cindy's drink were in the shape of little space invaders. Very cool.

The food options are a little less zany - the vego menu made up of four pizzas, four pastas and a couple of rice dishes (vegan options are plentiful and clearly marked). Cindy decided she was up for some pasta and ordered the mushroom and pepperoncino spaghetti (750 円/$9).

As you can see, this wasn't a particularly exciting meal - it was tasty enough, but given the high standards we'd become used to in Japan, it didn't really measure up.

My Thai-style curry with rice (700 円/$8.50) was a bit better , with a pretty impressive curry sauce and some nice, fresh vegetables.

I think though that Cafe La Siesta is really a better place to go drinking than eating - it was empty when we were there between seven and eight and I get the impression that it's much more popular as a nightspot than as a restaurant. It's certainly easy to imagine having a great time drinking cocktails and playing Streetfighter or Afterburner until the wee hours. Unfortunately we were both pretty shickered from our long day (and besides I think Cindy's patience for video games was wearing pretty thin - we sat right by an old console with a case full of games to choose from and I quickly turned into a terrible dining companion).

So we headed back out into the night and had one last look at the cherry blossoms before jumping on the train home to bed.

March 30, 2010: Kyoto II

After the evening's unseasonable snow burst, Tuesday dawned fine and clear, so we decided to tackle a Lonely Planet temple walking tour through the Southern Higashiyama area. As did everyone else in the greater Kyoto area. Within fifteen minutes of setting out we'd come across three other people furrowing their brows at the same walking tour in the Japan Lonely Planet guide.

The walk started us off up Chawan-zaka (teapot lane), filled with tourists and pottery shops and leading up towards the first temple of the day Kiyomizu-dera with its famous red pagoda.

It's a large temple complex dating originally from the seventh century, with beautiful gardens, lots of small shrines and an impressive main hall.






And people. Lots and lots of people.


The waters of the temple are supposedly healing, but both Cindy and I were in pretty good nick, so we dodged the queue of people lining up for their sacred sips.

Making our way out of Kiyomizu-dera we found ourselves on Sannen-zaka, a laneway crowded with pedestrians, cherry blossoms and gorgeous traditional wooden buildings.

In the middle of this street was our lunch spot: Okutan, a 350 year old vegetarian Buddhist restaurant. Luckily for us the Pocketguide had the name of this place in Kanji as well as in English characters, as there was nothing on the sign that we could read - we found a few restaurants in the neighbourhood and matched symbols.

Tofu is a particular speciality of the Kyoto area and, though many tofu restaurants use loads of fish products, there are a few vego-friendly places like this one that prepare glorious tofu-based feasts. The setting was stunning - low tables, tatami mats and big windows looking onto a peaceful courtyard garden. Everything seemed quite traditional, so Cindy and I spent a good portion of the meal worrying about doing something wrong - are you supposed to dip this tofu in that sauce? Can you drink from the soup bowl? Sure we were going to offend somebody, we took our time, observing the tables around us before making fools of ourselves.

The menu is basically set: we were given two options that we didn't quite understand and chose the second one. I think this was the bigger, slightly more expensive version of the set lunch (4000 円, $46), but I'm still not sure. It's hard to imagine that it was the smaller option - there was loads of glorious food.

First up was a chunk of tofu that wasn't even really tofu. Goma dofu is sesame tofu, a tofu-like substance made predominantly from sesame paste rather than soy and served with a light soy sauce and a dab of wasabi on top. The block of 'tofu' had a light sesame flavour, but served mostly as a vessel for the soy sauce and wasabi.

Next up were these cute little tofu sticks, each skewer spearing through a miso marinated, lightly scorched chunk of tofu.

These were the highlight of the meal, finally helping me to realise how great miso can taste. I could have eaten about twenty of them.

While we were making our way through the skewers, the meal's centrepiece came out: a pot of tofu that's boiled and then kept warm over a little flame at the table.

The tofu chunks are eaten with a topping of spring onions, soy sauce and a strange pepper-like seasoning that neither Cindy or I could quite place. Again, the tofu is not particularly flavourful, but its freshness and texture made for a hearty and satisfactory lunch.

But of course, there was more. Next up was this stunning tempura plate, featuring a mix of vegies, tempura nori and a beautiful perilla leaf.

As well as all of this food (and I ended up eating about three-quarters of the boiled tofu, Cindy wasn't keeping up by the end) there was rice and tea, so we left stuffed to the gills with soy-based delights. Even Astroboy is a fan.

Walking a little more slowly now, we continued on our tour. First, along historic Ninaen-zaka and Ishibei-koji, filled with traditional tea-houses and shops.

Then past Kodai-ji, which had too many stairs for us to venture into in our overfull states.

And then into Maruyama-koen, a bustling park containing Kyoto's most famous cherry blossom tree, which hadn't quite hit full stride when we were there (possibly due to unseasonable snow!).

After a quick rest in the park, we carried on to Chion-in, the impressive headquarters of the Jodo school of Buddhism.


Then it was time to trek back to town, past the massive red gate of the Heian-jingu, to the river and the train station that would get us back to our hotel and some rest.


name="mikoan"After a couple of hours lazing, we were ready to head back out and track down some dinner. Our destination was Mikoan, a tiny Buddhist cafe tucked down an improbably narrow laneway. Inside, the restaurant resembled a living room even more than Sunny Place, with clutter and cat paraphernalia taking up every spare corner of the cramped space. Again we were seated at a bar, with all the cooking and meal preparation taking place right in front of us.

Our pitiful monolingual skills were once again saved by the set dinner option - it really does make ordering simple - which came in at just 1000 円 ($11.50). Impressively, the two women working the kitchen managed to provide almost entirely different set meals for the two of us to share. After the lunch we'd had, we were both quite happy not to see any tofu in the sets.

We each scored rice, soup and a sprout-based salad, but while Cindy got some fried 'chicken' pieces, a pumpkin-based salad and some sort of carrot and cabbage based pickle, I ended up with intriguing spring rolls, a green salad and a pumpkin based pickle.


We split things almost evenly and devoured the lot - the spring rolls were filled with an odd dryish filling that reminded Cindy of tuna, but left me baffled, while the pumpkin pickle in my set was tangy, sweet and amazing. Clearly Mikoan is working a very similar vein to Sunny Place - it's too hard to pick a favourite, we'd recommended both to anyone passing through Kyoto.