GW2023 D5 Exploring gardens around Kyoto

Route: Kyoto to Uji and back
Bicycle: 54 km
Walking in parks and temples/shrines: 5.4 km
Total Riding time: 4:12 h
Average Speed: 12.9 km/h
Total Ascent: 339 m
Weather: surprisingly sunny and quite hot… but still just about bearable, 25 C

After the long ride around Lake Biwa yesterday, today I needed a much more relaxing day. So I looked in the internet for suggestions of gardens with hydrangea and/or azalea / rhododendron which are currently in flower (at least I saw already a bunch back at lake Biwa but also in the mountains between Kyoto and Takashima. And I found 4 potentially interesting places:

• Jonan-gu shrine

• Manpuku temple

• Mimuroto temple 

• Keihanna Commemorative Park

I only made it to the first 3 of these places, but each of them (!) was a real discovery. It was really amazing. I have been in Kyoto and around Kyoto quite frequently, or so I thought. So I wasn’t expecting to be able to discover in one ride 3 totally new places and each of them absolutely enchanting.

I started with Jonan-gu, quite close to my hotel and in what from even a few meters away seems to be a quite industrial, heavily traffic ridden neighbourhood you would not want to visit… but as so often in Japan the most beautiful places can be in the least beautiful neighbourhoods. 

Jonan-gu itself, i.e. the shrine is a pretty normal shrine… but it has a huge garden around. Actually it isn’t one garden, but a array of different gardens of different Japanese garden design from different centuries. Like a exhibition of garden design. Gardens focussed on cherry and plum blossoms, garden focused on water, a rock garden, … I forgot how many different Japanese gardens, but probably somewhere around 8 - 10! 

There wasn’t too much blooming right now, except the water lilies… which was a bit surprising as I had seen both wisteria as well as azaleas in full bloom back at Lake Biwa a few days ago. But even so the garden was exceptional. No idea why this place isn’t one of the “must visit places in Kyoto”… but no complaining here… was nice to have a garden with just a few other (mostly local) tourists. I even bought a tenugi for my wall in Tokyo. 

And as said… the surroundings themselves were rather dreadful:

After this first great visit, I got back into the saddle and started cycling towards Uji on a reasonably planned route. My next stop was Manpuku-ji. A temple with a distinctive Chinese influence. 

I took my time visiting this temple, as it was getting hotter and hotter… and the temple is rather large, with a lot of buildings. But in the temple one could find some respite. Once done visiting, I went to a temple nearby that was making publicity to have ‘temple noodles”… and yes, they had ramen with mountain vegetables, in a space where in the back room Buddha was worshipped, while in the front people where having their ramen. 

I probably spent the hottest ours of the day here… before continuing on to Mimuroto temple, famous for its hill covered in blooming azaleas. 

I had comfortably time here to visit everything before the garden was going to close. But clearly I had not enough time to cycle to the much further afield 4th sightseeing spot of the day. So I replanned my route (now very easy with Komoot and my wahoo, that allows for uploading a newly planned route on the go, something my garmin was not able to do), cycled through central Uji and on to the Kizugawa in the South with its cycling path. I made brief stop at this famous submersible bridge, walked halfway across and then continued along the river back to Kyoto and my hotel. 

The only disappointment of the day was the onsen at the end of it. I had searched for super sento’s in Kyoto and Fushimi Chikara-no-yu had come up… but it was a rather outdated supersento. And what killed it for me was the inability to choose the water temperature for the shower. But hey, one disappointment in a day of 3 major discoveries isn’t bad at all.