The Arashiyama district lies west of Kyoto City, but is easily accessible by train. This relatively less well-known area shows up in as a brief paragraph in the travel guides we got, and even its Wikitravel entry notes that this area while popular with locals is mostly dismissed by foreigners. The better for us, because that’s where we headed on Day 7, Tuesday. Took a train out of Karasuma station at 8:00 AM, did a platform change at Katsura station and took that train all the way to the end of the line at Arashiyama.
Arashiyama is noted for its shrines and temples, its Monkey Park, the Togetsu-kyo (or wooden ‘moon-crossing’ bridge), and its bamboo grove. Ling had bad dreams just the previous night and felt that it was God’s way of telling her not to visit too many temples and shrines, so those were out for this trip. Of the remaining highlights, we’ve seen just about enough monkeys to last a life time (we still have nightmares of those fellows at Ubud Monkey Sanctuary!). That left us with the moon bridge and the bamboo grove. Doesn’t sound like much, but the grove was absolutely magnificent! The tall bamboos reach upwards of 10 meters or more into the sky straight up, and for much of the grove the covering foliage shields visitors from sunlight. Moreover, the time we visited the grove was about mid-morning where very few visitors were still about, creating a sense as though we were walking through a mystical forest with no one else about.
The bridge that goes across Katsura River was long but I felt not really a spectacular sight in itself (Ling liked the bridge though); the low water tides made it hard to frame shots without having parts of the riverbed in the picture. But we spotted herons and cranes, and spent a good part of our visit photographing them.
As with several other places we’ve visited in our Kyoto trip so far, it’s advisable to always start the day’s itinerary early as there are often very few people about. Worth a 2-3 hour visit, if nothing else for its bamboo grove.
in memoirs of a geisha, there was a scene in which zhang ziyi was driven in a car through this bamboo grove!
Ya Ling mentioned it to me while we were there too, though I can’t for my life remember that scene!