And thats all i'm going to say about him...
We ventured out on public transport, as it seemed too far to walk to get to the golden temple, even for two hardenned walkers like me and Raul. Infact we were seemed as strange (for other reasons as well) for walking everywhere, others rented bikes or took the bus, while the two of us strode through the streets giving me a chance to actually make myself useful and read a map.
The golden temple lived upto its name (see the multitude of photos i took of the place) the gardens, like all japanese gardens were stunning, but the temple almost seemed too much. It was the only temple i saw in the entire trip that i would think about painting with the title "gawdy" as the golden outer shell just seemed not to fit with the spiritual idea of the building.
The problem with japanese transport is that its packed, most of the time. on the way up it wasnt so much a problem, except i didnt really know which stop we needed so it was a lottery as to whether someone hit the stop button for me, or we sailed past the stop we needed and just went on a bus route tour back to the central station.
On the way back, the buses were RAMMED and there were a good 15-20 people at every stop waiting patiently to get on, so, that distance which was too far for us to walk in the morning, well, we walked it in the afternoon.
Another day we did a huge amount of walking was when we went south, to the Torii walk, countless bright orange gates sweeping across the mountainside upto the ridge which lined one side of Kyoto. It was a warm day, so good to get under the cover of the trees where it was very cool by comparison. We encountered large spiders, steep steps, and lots of statues of foxes which we didnt really understand.
The main discussion of the day however was how did my camera, which id invested in a cannon like Raul's, get a different shade of orange out of the Torii than his. We spent quite a while taking comparison shots of the same thing in order to attempt to work out the difference, and he failed!
