day 12...

...saw us making a dash to the fushimi-inari taisha shrine just outside central kyoto, and thereafter heading back from kyoto to tokyo on the hikari express again...

originally, we had intended to take the morning easy but decided to do the fushimi-inari last minute...and it was a decision that was well-founded

the shrine was bloody fantastic! if you had watched Memoirs of A Geisha, you'd remember the scene where Zhang Ziyi had run down a parth that was lined with vermillion shrine gates (known as torii) all the way...this is the place where it was filmed...

and as we were fairly early, there weren't many people and the surroundings were eerily quiet...combined with the cool clear weather (as it is somewhat up a hill and forested), it was quite surreal...

we got back to tokyo late evening around late evening and decided to call it a day, buying bento boxes back for dinner instead of going out...we were pooped...