After a short train ride we arrived at the Fushimi Inari Shrine (aka Thousand Torii Gate Shrine). This shrine is dedicated to Inari who is the Shinto god of rice. Shrines to Inari are very common, however, this site is unique because of the trail of torii gates that lead up and down the sacred Mt Inari.
We made it to the trail, but it was really busy, so Kenya had us walk through the woods for a few minutes before we met back up with the main trail.
The torii gates are donated to the shrine by companies or individual people. They can range from 400,000 yen (~$2700) to 1,000,000 yen (~$6800) for the bigger ones! Each torii gate has the company or persons name and the date painted on the back of it. Most of them are vermilion and wooden, but there were some stone ones too.
[Cat!]
We hiked up to a spot where there were a lot of tiny shrines just full of tiny vermilion torii gates!
We hiked up a little further and Kenya told us he wasn't feeling well. He said that he's been working for a few weeks straight without a break and it's catching up to him. Totally understand! He told us that we should go up to the look out point to see the view. We thought that was a great idea! We left Kenya at a nice little cafe with some water and Luke and I continued our hike.
After about 20 minutes we made it to the look out point!
It was very nice! Kenya told us we could do the entire loop if we wanted to but it takes about two hours and it's a lot of stairs. We decided to just go up to the lookout point and then we went back to check on Kenya.
Kenya was feeling much better so we headed down the mountain and got some ice cream! Kenya then took us back to the Minamiza Theater and showed us where we would be meeting up with our group for our night time food tour. We thanked him for such a great day and told him to go get some rest! Kenya was very nice and extremely knowledgeable. He was definitely one of my favorite tour guides that we had in Japan! This is where we booked the excursion.
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