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Any post on this blog that starts with a closeup of a glass of beer has to be a good post. This is certainly not the first and likely won't be the last post that's started that way. Shocker, I know! This delicious pint of Fuller's Black Cab Stout in the matching glass (the way it's supposed to come) was captured on film (or maybe not film, exactly)  and then downed lovingly at The Hydrant pub in London right near The Monument in 2016. Yummy! Give me English beer over any other nation's beer any day!

It's now been more than nine weeks since my cancelled trip to Costa Rica was due to depart but didn't, a casualty of the global pandemic we now still find ourselves in more than two months after I was supposed to board a southbound flight at Dulles Airport. Last week, I cancelled my second trip of 2020, a long weekend in New Mexico visiting a site that I should have visited 19 years ago but which I missed because I just didn't get how big the Land of Enchantment is. Go figure! I guess now it's going to be 20 years at least.

Since I've been grounded, I've been combing through my picture archives from the last almost seven years that I've been traveling in a deliberate way and writing about it in this blog. I thought it might give me some hope for the day I can go somewhere new on this rock of ours if I posted some pictures of a great past memory. I've been doing that on Twitter every day since March 26, the day I was supposed to go to Costa Rica. As of today, I'm up to day 65. I'm going to keep going until I take my next trip, whenever and wherever that might be.

Some of the pictures I've posted over the last couple of months have appeared on this blog. Others have not. For whatever reason, they ended up on the cutting room floor, likely because I either elected not to write about that day or moment in time that I took the picture or just couldn't find a way to work them into a post. I miss writing about traveling, so for this post (and since I'm not going anywhere right now), I thought I'd write a few words about some of the photographs I've unearthed this spring. They are presented in the order I tweeted them. And, no, I'm not covering all 65 days.

Hawaii (2016)

One of the most disappointing experiences we've had over the last seven years was in Hawaii. I know, right? Who'd have thought? I sound completely spoiled. But it's true. 

We decided to spend the better part of one of our days on the island of Maui in February of 2016 by driving from Kahului to Hana on a road appropriately named the Road to Hana. It's a twisty, turny highway right along the ocean front with tons of pullouts and scenic views and secluded hikes to waterfalls along the way. It sounded cool as hell, especially when we had rented a Jeep Wrangler to get there.

It sucked. Honestly for us it was almost a complete waste of time. Sure we enjoyed a hike into the woods but other than that it was literally just a drive to a hardware store. A long, long drive to a hardware store. And I really do mean a hardware store. That's what's at the end of the road. Seriously. And nothing else. We got there, were supremely disappointed and headed back, without stops on the return journey.

So why am I reminiscing about a day that was almost a complete waste of time? Because "almost" is the key word. Along the way we stopped at Aunty Sandy's, a roadside stand selling hot, fresh banana bread, for breakfast. We walked down to the ocean and sat while we ate our loaf of banana bread and looked out at the view above. If there's ever been a breakfast I've eaten with a better view, I can't remember it. We were literally in paradise. We got nothing out of that drive except that view. And ultimately, that was enough because I'm remembering it four years later.

Venice (2015)

If there's something every first time tourist has to do in Venice, it's take a gondola ride along the Grand Canal. Sure it's overpriced, too short and a little cheesy. A complete tourist trap in other words. We did it anyway. How could we not? The Grand Canal is one of the great boulevards in Europe, albeit the only one made out of water. We have a picture in our house of us in the gondola with our gondolier smiling giving us two thumbs up after our ride. It was completely awesome, despite the fact that it's a total tourist trap.

When I was paging through my old directories of past trips, I found the picture above, which shows a series of gondolas in the foreground and Andrea Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore church in the background across the water. For me, that church and those boats bring me back to Venice instantly. They are enduring symbols of that city. To find a picture with both in them at once brought back the three days we spent there in vivid detail. This photograph must have been taken late in the day because the gondolas are closed up for the day and the sun is hitting the west side of the church as it is setting.

I loved Venice. I thought it would be flooded and overcrowded with both tourists and pigeons. It was none of those things. I could have spent a week or more just wandering around the canals and streets of this place. It's definitely on the would love to go back list. But then again, so are a lot of places.

Brú na Bóinne, Ireland (2019)

Every so often I write almost an entire blog post about a place and then discard it. My post about Brú na Bóinne from the end of last year is the latest one of these posts to be started and never see the light of day. Sometimes I lose inspiration about a post or can't find enough to say or am just forcing things and decide to give up rather than completing something that's not worth the time and effort. With Brú na Bóinne, it just came down to not many interesting photographs. 

I've been to some pretty ancient places over the last seven years or so. Prehistoric petroglyphs in the American southwest. All sorts of Roman ruins. Stonehenge. Machu Picchu. I never would have thought the most ancient site with construction at the hand of man would be in Ireland but Brú na Bóinne beats all those other places handily in the age department. 

What we saw that day in the Irish countryside was a passage tomb, a stone structure beneath a mound of earth that's stood in place for 3,200 years. Stepping inside this place and hearing our guide talk about the history of the place and its relationship to the solstices was just amazing. The amount of labor that must have gone into putting this place together so precisely must have been staggering.

I love this picture as a reminder of what we experienced that day but I also love it because it's about the most green photograph I've ever taken in my life. It's perfect as a memento of Ireland which shone so brightly on some days and disappointed us so badly on others. A day at Brú na Bóinne was not one of the disappointing days.

Mount Fuji, Japan (2017)

When I first made my list of must sees for my one and only (so far) trip to Japan, it needed some serious editing. There's often a dilemma with me between getting into one spot in a country super deep vs. moving around and seeing a lot at the risk of spreading myself too thin. In the end, I think I sort of split the baby on Japan. Mount Fuji made the initial list and survived the cut down.

There's not much to a visit to Mount Fuji unless you are intending to take a hike right to the summit, which in mid-May we weren't planning doing. We hopped on a bus for an hour or two and got dropped off about halfway up the slope on the north side. There's a store and some food vendors and (of course) a Shinto shrine but not much else. You just sort of do what you can until the next bus shows up to take you home or wherever the next stop is that you have a ticket for.

But there's something about Fuji. It's a picture perfect single volcanic peak and its shape couldn't be a more idealized cone shape. It's like a cartoon image but its presence and meaning in the lives of the Japanese is huge. It was important to me to stand on the mountain on my first visit to Japan. So we did. 

The day we were there it was about impossible to photograph the mountain either because of the cloud cover or we weren't standing in the right spot or there was some object or human in the way. This picture is my favorite of the day, taken from the front steps of the Komitake Shrine where I purchased what is now my niece's goshuin-cho and then half filled it with goshuin, the calligraphy and temple seal artworks that you can collect from each temple or shrine you visit in the country. To me, this picture reminds me of how cold and isolated and spiritual it was on Fuji and it also shows off the peak of the mountain which I love.

I can almost guarantee the reason why this picture hasn't appeared on this blog before this post is that it has a portrait orientation and plain and simple I usually use landscape orientation or square photographs in this blog. Today, that doesn't matter.

Roosevelt Island, New York City (2019)

I am pretty sure without really checking too closely that I've visited New York City more than any other destination in the past seven years. I don't think there's really any need to check. I just know it's true. Despite all the time I've spent in the Big Apple, I've only written one post about my experiences there, a 2015 visit to the Statue of Liberty's crown.

The reason for this is simple: we are usually in New York to do the same things we love doing over and over again and by that I mean Broadway shows, trips to Kalustyan's to stock up on spices and chutney and our new tradition of dinners of chicken skewers at the excellent, excellent Tori Shin restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. Simply put...New York is where we would live if we could afford to live in the manner we want to live there. We can't. So we don't.

Every so often I do something in New York that approaches post-worthy status. My trip to Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River last year almost made it. As many times as I've been to New York, I'd never been there before last summer to see the ruins of the old smallpox hospital and Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms State Park, which was executed posthumously (and therefore in my opinion not the way Kahn would have done it; the great architects always tweak during construction). It's totally worth a trip.

One of the best parts of this day was getting to the island, which can be visited by bus, Subway or ferry. Or you can take the tram, which takes you above the city from 2nd Avenue to the middle of the East River. You'll get some killer views of the City as you ride alongside the Queensboro Bridge for the low, low price of a Subway ride. The picture above shows the tram approaching the Roosevelt Island terminal. Do this if you are in New York, even if you turn right back around and go back to Manhattan.

Ollantaytambo, Peru (2019)

Last year we spent about a week deep in the heart of the Andes exploring the cities and towns and citadels of the Incan Empire. Our trip took us from Lima on the coast of Peru up to the Incan capital of Cusco and then over to a spot where we hiked for a day to the royal retreat called Machu Picchu.

When the Spanish conquistadors "discovered" the Incan Empire in 1526, they took what they wanted almost from day one. The Incas proved no match for the Spanish from the very first engagement although it was really the horses that they couldn't compete with. A man who has never seen a horse before in his life is no match for a trained and heavily armed soldier on the back of a 2,000 pound animal. Almost every engagement the Spanish had with the native Peruvians resulted in a victory for the Europeans except one: Manco Inca's stand at Ollantaytambo, a fortified hilltop between Cusco and Machu Picchu.

Today Ollantaytambo is one of many sites with ruined but mostly intact Incan masonry structures, a testament to the timeless quality of Incan construction. And like some of those other sites, the remains of building at Ollantayambo are in what seem like the most remote and most inaccessible locations you can possibly imagine. 

This photograph of some abandoned grain warehouses is my favorite of our partial day stop in town. I appreciate the way these old buildings are just clinging to the most precarious of slopes and blend in perfectly with the mountainside. We didn't have time that day to explore these ruins but I got as far as I reasonably thought I could from our tour group to get a picture I thought I'd be happy with. And I am.

Kyoto, Japan (2017)

I know, I know, I already put a picture of Japan on this post. What can I say? Japan was simply one of the most amazing places I've ever been. I can't wait to go back. And yes, it's ahead of Venice. Way ahead.

It's difficult to describe all the ways I love Japan from my week and a half or so there in 2017. It's a place with so many details. Tradition. Respect. Humility. Incredible food. Gorgeous nature. Spiritualism. Cutting edge modern anything. Boozy late nights of karaoke. The markets. The temples. The bars. Cleanliness. Order. Speed. Crowds. There are so many sights and smells and tastes and sounds to take in.

As we walked around Kyoto, which is the traditional capital of shogun-era Japan, I couldn't help but notice these red paper lanterns with birds on them. They seemed to be everywhere in that city as we roamed the streets and alleys in search of geishas or gyoza or street markets or temples. I took this picture because I wanted to find one of these lanterns in a store and bring it back and hang it in our home. We never found a paper lantern store. But this is still one of my favorite details of Kyoto.

Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (2018)

We've been fortunate in the last five years to have taken two safari trips to sub-Saharan Africa. We spent less than a week in primarily Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2015 to get our feet wet and then really did it right a couple of years ago by spending a week each in Kenya and Tanzania. The diversity of wildlife and the almost completely untouched environment is like no other place on Earth I've been.

In 2015 we didn't know what to expect. We were happy to see anything that we'd only ever previously seen in a zoo somewhere. Fortunately, elephants, hippos and lions featured heavily. In 2018, I went with a top 10 list of species that we hadn't been able to find on our first trip. I think we got seven of the ten. Maybe eight.

Never in my wildest imaginings would I have expected to find the birds in Kenya and Tanzania to be one of the more fascinating aspects of that trip. I've never been much of a birds guy (ostriches and storks and things like that don't really count here) but those two weeks in eastern Africa, particularly at Lake Manyara and Serengeti National Park, really opened my eyes and I fell in love. Who knew lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters could be so interesting? The picture above shows four superb starlings. I love how the colors pop against the thorny gray tree (always with the thorns in Africa...) they are roosting in and I love that I got a group of four all in one shot. I have no idea how this didn't make my Serengeti post. Too focused on the wildebeest and zebras in that location I guess.

One day soon, I'm hoping that I'll be writing again about some new places I've visited. I have to find a way to do some low risk traveling sometime in the next three months and hopefully I won't be cancelling any more flights or hotels. I'll leave this post with a black-backed jackal at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. Haven't posted this one to Twitter yet but I'm sure it's going to be there if this thing goes on long enough. Stay safe out there.

Goshuin

Yesterday I posted my impressions of the many Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines we visited in Japan in May of this year. Part of that post covered the goshuin, or temple seals, that you can purchase as a memento of your visit to each site. These souvenirs are not objects; rather they are individual works of art that the temple monks or calligraphists combine with a stamped image to commemorate your visit. 

Each goshuin you purchase is recorded in a stamp book (or goshuin-cho), which becomes a unique record of your time in Japan. It is unlikely that your goshuin-cho is identical to any other. Even if you visited the same temples and shrines in exactly the same sequence on exactly the same days, the people creating the calligraphy noting the name of the temple or shrine and the date of your visit would have to be exactly the same to create two-of-a-kind goshuin-cho.

If I stand a chance of instilling my love of travel in anyone in a future generation, it is my niece, whose birthday is today. I am passing my goshuin-cho to her today in the hopes that she will both appreciate the 12 goshuin I collected this year and one day fill the book on a trip of her own to Japan. Just so we all know exactly which goshuin came from which site, I'm posting pictures of each one here and identifying its origin. Enjoy!

Note on the pictures below: the goshuin-cho is filled from right to left. Therefore I have listed the goshuin on the right of the picture first for each image. I get that it's confusing. I thought it was important to list the goshuin in the sequence received.

Komitake Shrine, Mount Fuji.

Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo (right); Fushimi Inari Shrine, Kyoto (left).

Gozendani Hohaijo (prayer area), Fushimi Inari Shrine, Kyoto (right); Todaiji Temple, Nara (left).

Kasuga Shrine, Nara (right); Kohfukuji Temple, Nara (left).

Gangoji Temple, Nara (right); Kinkakuji Temple, Kyoto (left).

Daigoji Temple, Kyoto (right); Kiezu-no-Reikado Hall, Mount Misen, Miyajima (left).

Itsukushima Shrine, Miyajima.

Temples + Shrines

Halfway up Mount Fuji in Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture there lives a demon, or tengu. He is infrequently seen but is often depicted either as a monstrous bird or a long-nosed, red-faced goblin. His exact purpose is unknown (over time, the meaning of the tengu has shifted from harbingers of war to protective but still dangerous spirits) but most today view him as a protector of the many climbers who ascend to Mount Fuji's summit each year.

Your best chance of spotting this helpful goblin is where he lives, at the Komitake Shrine at Mount Fuji's Fifth Station on the north side of that mighty old volcano. Mount Fuji is divided into ten stations, from the first at the base of the mountain to the tenth at the very top. The four fifth stations (generally speaking one at each of the cardinal directions) are generally used as departure points for climbers when the trails are open in the summer months. It would therefore make sense that a demon to protect climbers would live at the starting point of the ascent, right?

As best I can tell, nobody much lives at the fifth stations other than the tengu. The Yamanashi Fifth Station on the north face is a collection of parking lots, horse stables, souvenir shops, food stalls and vending machines and the staff required to maintain this sort of infrastructure can't be more than 10 or 20 folks. Yet there's a Shinto shrine there, a timber framed building with a pitched roof and golden decorations on the ends of the timber beams used to frame it. I guess it's there for the residents and vendors and tourists and would-be Edmund Hillarys to visit. Welcome to Japan.

While I am no mountain climber (at least not this year), one thing I had to do on my first trip in Japan was set foot on Mount Fuji. And the fifth station on the north side, which is open year round provided the roads are passable, seemed like as good a place as any to satisfy that urge. And sure enough, I found myself at the Komitake Shrine while there, not looking for a demon necessarily, but making sure I understood my luck for this trip by buying a fortune (I got a lucky one) and picking up a Japanese zodiac-themed lucky charm for my less fortunate traveling companion. 

Gilded phoenix decorations on the doors of Hanazono Shrine in Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood.

The Komitake Shrine was the first of 12 or 13 or so Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples that we visited in our week and a half in Japan. If that seems like a lot, it is. And it isn't. So much of the understanding of that country's history and peoples are tied up in religion, or more accurately spirituality. It seems almost impossible to me to visit Japan without spending time at the many many temples and shrines that exist seemingly everywhere.

When I use terms like "everywhere" and "many many" I really mean it. It seems impossible to walk very far in Japan without bumping into a temple or a shrine. Consider this: there are approximately 200 churches in Paris, a city of 2.2 million people; Kyoto has 1/3 fewer residents than Paris but by estimates I have read has about 1,400 more temples and shrines than Paris has churches. It seemed to me that there were a lot of churches when I visited Paris last year; trust me when I say Japan has a ton of temples and shrines.

We knew this before we left for our vacation about a month and a half ago and we deliberately tried to self-limit the amount of time we were going to spend checking out religious sites. After all, we wanted a well-rounded introduction to Japan. Our initial thoughts were centered on sumo, Hiroshima, food, maybe some video games and something to do with the history of the samurai. Visits to temples and shrines would fill in the gaps. If you had told me before I left we'd end up at 12 or 13 of these things, I might have said it was too much. It turned out to be just about right for 10 full days.

Kohfukuji Temple in Nara. The 50 meter high pagoda is Japan's second tallest.

Perhaps a stop for a little history and perspective is in order. First a little bit about the difference between a temple and a shrine. There are two predominant religions in Japan: Shintoism and Buddhism. Shintoism is the historically indigenous religion of Japan, having origins it is believed to about three centuries before the start of our Common Era (or BCE, if you prefer) but whose written history dates to about the 700s. Shintoism is centered around the worship of a number of different deities, or kami, representing specific aspects of life. Shinto houses of worship are referred to as shrines.

Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 600s and quickly became the adopted religion of the court. It originated somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries BCE in what is now India based on the teachings of the original Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. The religion is founded on a concept of a cycle of rebirth where the goal is to achieve enlightenment. Depending on the type of Buddhism being practiced, you are either seeking to achieve a state of Nirvana to break the cycle of rebirth or to become a Buddha and remain in the cycle to help others. Buddhist houses of worship are referred to as temples.

I am quite confident I've glossed over the subtleties and complications of both religions in the prior two paragraphs. I apologize for any unintended offense given.

Looking back down the hill through the vermillion torii at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto.

One of our strategies for making sure we spent an appropriate amount of time (read: not too much) at temples and shrines was to focus our visits to these sites on the ancient Japanese capitals of Nara and Heian-kyo (which today is Kyoto). We were so bought into this strategy that we intended to deliberately exclude all temples and shrines in Tokyo from our must-see list. That almost worked.

Traditionally, the capital of Japan was based in the home of the emperor. That meant the location shifted around a lot. In 710, the capital was moved to Nara and was stabilized there for a while, and by that I mean just 84 years. When that happened, a number of older temples and shrines actually moved their buildings to Nara to be closer to the court and new temples and shrines were constructed at the direction of the emperor. Nara to this day has a bunch of temples, including what are known as the Seven Great Temples of Nara (we visited three).

Once the capital shifted to present-day Kyoto, new temples and shrines sprang up around that city. Kyoto managed to  maintain its capital of the country status a bit longer than Nara, about 990 years longer to be precise or until 1868. The 794 relocation of the capital didn't diminish Nara's importance as a spiritual center, but Kyoto grew to match Nara's stature. Given the history of this over 1,000 year span that the capital was in Nara and Kyoto, we figured these two cities were the place to concentrate on temples and shrines.

Keizu-no-Reikado Hall near the top of Mount Misen, Miyajima.

Now, we are not the only people who visit these sites. And I'm not just talking about other tourists wandering the land in search of these things. We found plenty of native Japanese walking alongside us in Kyoto and Nara and everywhere else we went. Indeed there are Buddhist pilgrimages which link together certain temples in a sequence. The Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage is a journey to 33 temples in the Kansai region of Japan; the 33 all depict an image of the goddess of mercy, Kannon. We stopped at two of these 33 in the Daigoji Temple in Kyoto and the Kofuhkoji Temple in Nara.

If 33 temples isn't enough for you, try the Shikoku Pilgrimage, a route on the island of the same name to 88 (!!!) temples associated with the monk Kukai. This pilgrimage was traditionally made on foot and is approximately 750 miles in length. If you are really motivated, you might be able to make it to all 88 in a month. Most people take two.

Some pilgrims on the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage record their visits in a prayer book. At each stop the staff at the temples mark each pilgrim's book with a red ink stamp and write in traditional calligraphy the name of the temple and the specific date of the image. We found these marks, called goshuin, to be offered at all the temples in addition to the Shinto shrines we visited. So in addition to the fortune and the lucky charm I picked up at Komitake, I also picked up a book (called a goshuin-cho) to start making my own pilgrim's record as I went.

These books fold out accordion style so you can see all the goshuin at one time. I filled 12 of my 22 empty pages on one side of the book which because it was purchased on Mount Fuji, is wrapped in an embroidered cover with Fujisan on one side and the tengu we didn't find at the Komitake Shrine on the other. Other temples and shrines we visited had similar site specific goshuin-cho which I think is pretty cool. It shows where you started your pilgrimage, especially since I am sure like most people, ours was totally haphazard and random.

Komitake Shrine, Mount Fuji. The starting point of our own unique pilgrimage around Japan.

My goshuin-cho showing goshuin from two sites plus the cover with the tengu from Komitake Shrine.

By American standards, all the temples and shrines we visited were old. It is difficult sometimes in a country where the 1600s passes for old to comprehend what old really means. Most of the temples and shrines we visited were founded between the sixth and ninth centuries with just one established as late as the 17th century. Most of these places have been witness to a little to a whole lot of history.

Each temple or shrine has a theme or a story to tell. Nara's Kasuga Shrine is about lanterns. And I mean a lot of lanterns. They are hanging from just about everywhere you can hang a lantern from. These things must look spectacular lit up at festival time. Visit the nearby Todaiji Temple and you find the world's largest bronze Buddha. It's enclosed within an enormous wooden structure that (just like many of these places) has burned down several times over the centuries they have existed. The Buddha kept sitting in the same spot; every time the structure burned down, they just built a new one to enclose the statue. 

Go see the giant buddha and the Kasuga Shrine in Nara. Make sure you don't miss the pitch black mirrored room filled seemingly with a million lit lanterns at Kasuga; it's pretty impressive.

Of all the temples or shrines we visited over a week and a half, I think the most spectacular was Kinkakuji in Kyoto, or what is sometimes referred to as the Golden Pavilion, which is shown in the top photograph of this post. Kinkakuji was built as a retirement home for the Shogun (or military dictator) Ashikaga Yoshimitisu, who transferred it to the Buddhist community via his will upon his death in 1408. The inside and outside of the building at the top two levels are coated with gold leaf and the whole structure is topped with a golden phoenix, just like the shogun left it. Although as you might have guessed from my remarks about Todaiji Temple, this place too has burned down a number of times, most recently in 1950 when it was set alight by one of the monks on purpose.

It seems about impossible not to take a gorgeous picture of the Golden Pavilion, which is impressive considering there will be tourists and adherents everywhere when you get there. But the Pavilion is off limits to visitors and is sited across a lake, which keeps people from being in front of the building when you fight your way to the front of the crowd to snap your souvenir pics as I did. It's quite a sight and definitely worth the train and bus ride out there.

The garden at Gangoji Temple in Nara.

If Kinkakuji took our breath away, a close second for most impressive was Miyajima's Itsukushima Shrine, home of the famous floating torii, or shrine gate, which is featured in most glamor shots advertising Japan as a tourist destination. My own picture of that iconic shot is at the bottom of this post.

Itsukushima, which is actually the name of the island commonly known as Miyajima, is either spectacularly located or can be a bit of a disappointment, depending upon when you visit. It is constructed at the back end of a beach that also holds the floating torii. Only the floating torii is only "floating" when the tide is in. Otherwise, it's just standing on the sand. Indeed, when the tide is truly all the way in, both the torii and the shrine itself are surrounded by the sea. Visit it then, please. Most hotels on the island will have schedules showing the tides for just that purpose. The picture I took of the floating torii was taken at 11:49 a.m. High tide was 2 minutes later. Hey, what can I say...I couldn't wait.

It is very likely that both Kinkakuji and Itsukushima will be packed full of tourists and gawkers unless you arrive really early, as will most of these places, in fact. But if you want to find something a little more serene, I'd suggest heading over to Kyoto's Daigoji Temple, which we found refreshingly unoccupied when we visited in the middle of the afternoon one day.

Daigoji is located towards the east end of Kyoto's Tozai subway line, a stop which seems to serve few people looking to sightsee in the city. Take a 30 minute or so walk to the east and you'll find Daigoji, which is a complex of buildings highlighted by spectacularly picturesque and peaceful gardens and five story pagoda built in the year 951, making it both Kyoto's oldest wooden structure and considering the fate of most wooden temples and shrines we visited, nothing short of a miraculous survivor. This was truly one of the most peaceful and contemplative sites we visited and most of it had to do with the general lack of other people there. It's a hike there and back, but there's a great convenience store with a couple of beer vending machines and some outside benches to sip one or two cold ones. Just don't sit in the great dane's spot. She gets confused when you do.

Nine of Kasuga Shrine's hundreds and hundreds of lanterns. Nara.

We made out pretty well by adding Kasuga and Itsukushima Shrines and Todaiji and Daigoji Temples to our list but the most rewarding of the sites we visited were the ones that required the most work to get to. These were Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto and Keizu-no-Reikado Hall near the top of Mount Misen on Miyajima Island. Both took a while to get to, both involved climbing up a really really to really really really big hill and both gave us a real sense of accomplishment as well as a great and totally natural stair master workout.

Before I got to Japan, I thought visiting the temples and shrines on our list would be much like visiting European churches. Maybe it takes an hour or so to get round the church and chapels and that probably includes enough time to climb the towers if there are any that are accessible. Some temples and shrines turned out to be just this way. Fushimi Inari didn't. It took four hours. It was completely worth it but just keep that in mind if you go.

If you've seen any images of Japan's shrines and it's not Itsukushima's floating gate, you've probably seen Fushimi Inari. Like most shrines, there is an enormous torii out in front of the place that marks the entrance to the shrine property. But Fushimi Inari has a torii hoarding problem; instead of one or two torii, this place has hundreds which form tunnels of orange gates (the Japanese call the color vermillion but I'm not buying it here) snaking up the mountainside from the entrance to the top of the shrine property.

Fushimi Inari is a shrine to Inari, the god of rice, and has traditionally been a merchant's shrine. Each of the orange torii you walk through on your way to the top was donated by a business, plain on the approach side and featuring kanji characters on the back side presumably listing the name of the donor. Get there at any time other than the crack of dawn and the place will be mobbed, with group after group waiting for the corridor to clear of pedestrians before snapping their souvenir images.

Here's a tip: keep going. Not everyone will. And eventually there will be more spots than you need to get some gorgeous pictures of the stacked torii. 

Here's another tip: be prepared to walk a lot. This is a long trek up a steep hill. You won't be walking up ramps here. You'll be stepping up staircase after staircase of stone steps. You'll hurt. You'll sweat. You'll pass many paired statues of foxes. You'll stop at more than one vending machine along the way. But once you are at the top, you'll feel like you've done something more than just walk around a shrine or temple for a few minutes. You'll feel like you've done something important. And you'll be right. Just budget a lot of time, that's all.

That's a big Buddha! At Nara's Todaiji Temple. 

The only experience that could have overshadowed our experience at Fushimi Inari was likely a similar climb with a better payoff. And by that I mean a hike (well at least partway) up Miyajima Island's Mount Misen to the Keizu-no-Reikado Hall or Lovers' Sanctuary and then beyond.

Miyajima Island is essentially a mountain poked out of the sea. The mountain is called Mount Misen and a good number of visitors to the island I assume end up at the top of the mountain at one time or another. You can climb to the top of the mountain from the seaside and according to some maps I saw around the island it will take you a couple of hours each way. Or you can do what we did and cheat, riding most of the way up on two cable cars (called ropeways on the island) and hoof it from there. I'd recommend going this way. I'm sure It's less spiritual. I'm also sure it's enough work by itself. And I don't for a minute believe the two hour estimate is correct.

The two goals in ascending Mount Misen as I see it are (1) to reach the Lovers' Sanctuary, which features an eternal flame lit by the monk Kukai (yes, the same Kukai of the 88 temple pilgrimage discussed earlier) and maintained alight for a cool 1,200 years and counting; and (2) to make it to the very top and take in the spectacular 360 degree view of the island and the Japanese mainland all the way to Hiroshima and beyond.

Get up early, get on the first ropeway car and get climbing. Step after step with stops periodically to admire the view and recuperate. The views are incredible. Take water because there are no vending machines (unlike everywhere else in Japan) and go step by step. It's worth it. It won't take as long as at Fushimi Inari but the scenery is more spectacular and I can't help thinking that the kind of work and suffering to get to these places is exactly what their founders had in mind when they built these things on top of enormous hills.

The picturesque Kanndo (yes, of the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage) at Daigoji in Kyoto.

If we hadn't climbed to the top of the Fushimi Inari Shrine and Mount Misen, our visits to temples and shrines would have been an essential part of our glimpse into the history and culture of Japan in the very short time we were there. I think we assembled a great list to visit and get souvenir goshuin. I've included one picture in this post from each place. But my experience walking all the way through the torii at Fushimi Inari and getting all the way to the top of Mount Misen put my own pilgrimage over the top into an ultimate experience. Each person it seems has to find their own way in Japan and I hope their temple and shrine visits will give them what I found.

Now, I mentioned earlier that we tried to exclude Tokyo from our temple and shrine list but honestly we couldn't quite help ourselves. About two blocks from our Shinjuku hotel early in the morning our first day we stumbled across the Hanazono Shrine. After we had bought our goshuin-cho on Mount Fuji, we returned a few days later to get a goshuin from what we at that point considered our home shrine in Tokyo.

When we were getting our books inscribed and stamped, we talked to the person (may have been a monk) expertly writing in our goshuin-cho. He was the only person doing this that we engaged in conversation. He asked where we were from and where we were headed to which we replied Washington, DC and ultimately Miyajima. He then mentioned that his goal in 2018 was to make his own pilgrimage of sorts to New Orleans to hear some Dixieland jazz. Sounds awesome to me. I told him to skip Bourbon Street and head to Frenchman Street. He told us Miyajima was worth the visit. I hope he follows my advice. I believed in his. We loved Miyajima. I hope he loves New Orleans.

Unwanted paper fortunes tied up at the Hanazono Shrine in Tokyo.

I'll close here with a few words about luck, something I think I've always had in abundance and for which I feel very blessed. 

I mentioned very early in this post that the fortune I received at the first shrine we visited was lucky. I stuck with that and didn't get another one. I mean why mess with success, right? Not all of us were so fortunate at that shrine and so in accordance with tradition, we knotted it to one of the strings at that site to leave the bad luck behind.

I also mentioned that to counteract that bad luck fortune, I picked up a lucky charm and gave it away in hopes that her luck would improve. Amazingly, it did. Despite receiving that downer of a fortune, the rest of our trip went very smoothly. We had incredible luck making connections on trains and finding luggage lockers at train stations and just generally making our way around Japan. However, in giving that charm away, I may have given away some of my own luck. The next morning I woke up to find my iPhone inoperable and it never recovered. I, however, did. Turns out I still had a little luck left in that my photos to that point in our trip all synched to the cloud and the next day I rebounded in full. Next time I buy someone a good luck charm, I'm going to make sure I get one for myself. I'm not tempting fate there again.

The floating torii at Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island.