K is for KANI

Kinosaki Onsen town is a popular town with lots of public onsen bathhouses to visit, as well as plentiful ryokans with private onsens as well. We visited Kinosaki onsen town as an overnight trip and stayed in the ryokan by the name of Kinosaki Onsen Higashiyamasou. The Kinosaki Onsen Ropeway is reachable by foot from Kinosaki Onsen town and provides a 7 minutes ride to the the mountain top where you can enjoy the beautiful view of the onsen town from above. At Kinosaki Onsen Ropeway, there are two stations, the onsenji station – which is the middle station and the mountain top station, which is the top.

If you love green tea, you should totally add the below to your itinerary – includes both green tea loving things and also non-green tea things to break up the green tea overload ;-) Byodo-in is a world heritage temple located in Uji, just 20 minutes away from Kyoto. Daiki-san and his brother own this green tea plantation business together and run daily tours in the area where you can visit their plantations, get to know more about the area, taste test different types of sencha/matcha, pick your own green tea leaves then take them back to their cafe & kitchen to turn into green tea tempura! Nearby Wazuka and Uji is also Shojuin temple, so there’s definitely an opportunity to also tack this onto your day or alternatively, visit it by itself separately. Shojuin temple is a temple I’ve always wanted to visit for its unique heart shaped ‘inome’ window which is believed to bring happiness and protect from disaster.

Prior to this trip, I had already been to Kyoto twice, so during my spare time on my third trip to this stunning city, I wanted to tick off some sights and things that I hadn’t seen before. If you stay near Kyoto station, you can take the express tourist bus which takes you to numerous sights in Kyoto including this one. Plus, the street Matsubara-dori approaching the temple is filled with souvenir stores and matcha products, it’s an absolute must-visit for anyone who comes to Kyoto. In Kyoto, one of the restaurants we visited was Kyoto Kohaku, a small homely place just off the main street.

I wanted to share a quick blog post featuring a few images of the beautiful town of Ine No Funaya. We visited Ine after Miyama (as we were travelling by private car) but if I were to recommend someone taking public transport, I’d suggest them visit Ine with Amanohashidate – a place I didn’t get a chance to see. It’s a view I loved seeing in person as it’s so unique to a place like Japan. These birds are called ‘kite’ birds and as you can see, I totally had way too much fun doing a little bird watching photo shoot haha.