Spent the day in Osaka. Here’s what i wrote in Koyasan last night:
We had to catch the 11 am train from Osaka to Koyasan in order to have enough time for sightseeing before evening prayers. So we left the apartment at 8:30 am to catch the bullet train to Osaka. That part of the trip only takes 13 minutes, but it cost $25 per person beause we paid for reserved seats. If we had known what we were doing, it would have taken us maybe 45 minutes instead of 2-1/2 hours to get where were going, and we could have saved $20 per person by taking a regular train and not reserving seats. Wahwah. Whatever. It’s vacation!
Aaaanyway, From there, we had to take the Osaka subway to a different train station. That was not quite as easy as buying bullet train tickets (which is easier than buying metra tickets), but there was a guy there whose job seemed to be finding people who need help and helping them.
The subway was subwaytastic, and then we had to walk to yet another station to catch our train to Koyasan. That one was a tad bit more confusing, mainly because we wanted to buy reserved seats for a train that didn’t offer reserved seats. The train to Koyasan had the most white people I’ve seen in one place since we got here. So I was pretty sure we were on the right train.
After about an hour and a half we got to Gokurambashi (or something like that), where we disembarked the train and got onto a cable car. The cable car was not as impresive as I’d imagined – there was no real view. At the top of the mountain we took a bus to the Okunoin temple.
The main thing to do here is to walk the path through the 500,000 tombs here, surrounded by huge trees. Even though it’s pretty cold up there, the mountain air is refreshing.
We’re now at Rengejo-in, which is run by a monk and his mother who both speak English. Because of that, it’s really popular with westerners, although we’ve only seen two other people, and they were Asian.
There’s no Interent here, so I’m writing this offline for future posting. We just had tea, and the evening ceremony is in 10 minutes, followed by a dinner of tofu and vegetables.
