Day 11 – Monday, 8 April 2024
The day started with packing – after five nights our stay in Kyoto ends today. Bags stuffed into the corner, we headed into the city centre and tried to catch a bus but, at approximately noon on a Monday, two turned up with insufficient room for all of us waiting at the stop. Kyoto public transport system, please note. Taxi, then, to the Philosophers Path. My extensive research into the place consisted of reading one para in a guidebook several days ago, all forgotten except that it’s supposed to be an excellent spot for seeing the cherry blossoms, a pertinent fact when I had not yet seen any cherry blossoms, now less so. Hell, I don’t even know if there’s supposed to be an apostrophe in the name and, if so, where. Anyway, it’s another walk along a canal lined with cherry trees, which are very lovely, etc, etc.
And so farewell to Kyoto. Dicking around getting about ten kilometres from north-east Kyoto to another part of north-east Kyoto then to central Kyoto took approximately the same time as the Nozomi shinkansen needed to get us 350 kilometres westwards to Hiroshima, a city famous for its off screen role in the movie Oppenheimer. I showed the boys some of the photographs of the city taken in the middle of August 1945, including the iconic dome. We arrived just in time for an evening stroll in the rain, dinner at a yakitori restaurant, and collapse. Saw the dome, bookmarked it for tomorrow.
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