Jean's Adventures: 1/30/06: Miyajima

This was my last day in Kyoto. I started with Kiyomizu-dera temple, which was nestled in the forrested mountains on the east edge of Kyoto and thus awesome. It was very misty, so after climbing for some time, I stumbled into this bright orange temple surrounded by lush trees and shrouded in mist [photo]. So beautiful. They also had this purification water fountain that fell off the roof into a pond below and you could ladle it from underneath the roof. Then I went to Miyajima, which is about 30 min from Hiroshima. Miyajima was fantastic. A picturesque island full of lush forrest covering several mountains. But the town itself is very small and just butts up against the mountains. There I saw the world's largest rice paddle [photo: awesome] that absolutely no one was impressed with; I had to wait such a long time to take a picture with people in it for scale. And as a consequence, every store has rice paddles of various sizes for sale. What Miyajima is really known for, though, is its water shrine, a shrine that at high tide is on water, and at low tide is on stilts. Most pictures of Miyajima are of the shrine gate, which is farther out [photo]. Since it was low tide, I got to walk out to the gate and take photos [photo]. Apparently, this shirne has been rebuilt something like 12 times. Then I went up in the incredibly overpriced skycars to the top of the highest mountain. Because it was misty/foggy, I couldn't see the other islands, but at the top there were... Monkeys!!! Little knee-high, and apparently sometimes vicious [photo] monkeys everywhere. They generally ignored me, but I had fun watching them eating, grooming each other, and walking around in pairs with one monkey's hands on the other's butt [photo]. Being the lame nerd that I am, I wondered if I could do a study there on monkey behaviour. I wouldn't mind living on Miyajima, I think; it was really a fun little town.