We checked out of Almont Hotel Kyoto early morning planning to catch the 8:10AM Thunderbird 5 Limited Express train to Kanazawa, but secretly hoping to catch an earlier train if we could. But we got a little lost at Kyoto Station and couldn’t immediately find the right counters to get our tickets. By the time we’d sorted it all out and got to the right departure platform – a platform 0, and it took us a while to believe one such existed – we were just ten minutes left before the train arrival.
The journey to Kanazawa was uneventful. We found our stay for the next five days – Hyatt Hotel Kanazawa – left our baggage there, had a wild mix of western, Indian, and Vietnamese lunch items at a level two restaurant at Cross Gate Kanazawa, took a quick look at Tsuzmi-mon Gate, . This landmark is unmissable at Kanazawa Station, and supposedly designed to model after a Japanese drum (a Tsuzmi) that’s shaped like an hourglass.
The rather busy bus terminal is in front of the train station, and the two directions of the two bus loops start and and here. We hopped onto one for our two stops for the afternoon: Higashi Chaya, and Kazue-machi Chaya districts – historical towns where old wooden houses still line the numerous side roads and alleys. The former was particularly busy, with a lot of visitors, several dressed in traditional attire, going about to soak in the atmosphere or pop into one of the numerous teahouses for drinks and snacks.
We’d initially set aside two hours to spend in this district, but ended up spending just half that time before we‘d seen everything we wanted
The old shop houses aside, and short of patronising a teahouse or the Gold Leaf shop to gawk at the pricey items there, we didn’t see anything else to do. The old wooden houses are really pretty, but the number of visitors today this weekend also made it hard to get pictures without visitors in the frame. So, after an hour exploration on foot, we figured we’d seen enough.
Continued in the next post where we crossed the road to take a look at Higashi Chaya district.