kyoto

      So from the farthest point on our trip we retraced our route as far as Kyoto. The station features a vast concourse matching Grand Central or Milan in scale, a futurist edifice designed by Hiroshi Mara and opened in 1997 with a 15 storey high barrel vault, and escalators going up and up to the sky. Like most of these Japanese rail hubs, the building incorporates a department store, shopping mall, restuarants and much more. We stayed in the 500 room Granvia Hotel there (we also stayed in station hotels in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, much the best way as these are also subway/tram/bus hubs so easy on arrival and for getting around the city). The hotel has all the self-confidcne and busy-ness of the best city hotels, with bellhops buzzing around, endless bowing functionaries (although their only function seemed to be bowing) and visitors from around the world coming and going.

     Kyoto was a city that grew on us over the days we spent there. There are wide boulevards but also a grid of narrow lanes, full of overhead wires and tiny businesses, and even tinier houses, all individual in design (you never see a terrace of identical units) and crammed in cheek by jowl, often with another house built on the land behind and accessed by a tiny passage. You could call it ugly, but it felt lived-in and even cute. The tiny houses mostly have a tiny car space with a tiny boxy car. These almost cartoonish vehicles are unique to Japan and very popular. The Nissan N-box is the country's best selling car. To the east of the city, particularly the Gion district, the houses are older, traditional timber stuctures. We wandered around after dark and although it's now rather touristy, its narrow dimly lit lanes, busy, gleaming Shinto shrines, and Japanese visitors in hired kimonos made gave a flavour of old Kyoto.

     As the former capital, until the 1860s, Kyoto has plenty of historic sites and we visited some of the most famous. The Higashi (eastern) Hongan-ji temple of a Buddhist sect is one of the world's biggest timber buildings and really is on a massive scale, with a calm, hushed interior that contrasts to the hubbub of Shinto shrines. The Imperial palace gardens are also huge, with wide gravel walkways, friendly herons and the forbidding walls of the palace itself. It contrasts with Nijo-jo, the double moated castle of the Shoguns. Here we visited the lavish audience chambers, splendid but fragile, all wood and paper sliding screens with wonderful wall paintings of tigers and wild landscapes; and numbing to our bare feet on this brilliantly sunny but chilly day.

     Further afield we visited the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine – at the foot of the mountain, it features thousands of torii gates framing the paths up the hillside and through bamboo forests. We were also lucky enough to visit the Katsura imperial villa, a modest retreat designed for moon-viewing, with elaborate gardens and tea houses for each season.

     Finally, we went to the railway museum. Although not train buffs we found this fascinating. Early steam trains through to the first shinkansen are on display, and it has what must be the world's biggest model train set.