A mountain, a beach and a bar

We had a good day on Thursday. Many of the things we saw reminded us of home, so that was kind of nice. Once we got home we figured that we spent a heck of a lot of time waiting for or on a train. We figured the time we spent riding around, we could've driven to Kelowna and half-way back home!

We decided to head out early…we said we would….and we actually did! We caught the 7:20am train and were on our way to Koya-san. We took the regular line for about 1.5 hours and then switched to an extremely small train (only about 3 cars). This squeaky sounding train took us up the mountain for about 30 minutes and the scenery was beautiful. We saw an abundance of lush vegetation including numerous bamboo trees :). After the line had ended we switched to a cable car which took us to the top of Mount Koya.



This mountain is Japan's most widely recognized and respected Shinto/Buddhist sites. It contains numerous temples, some of which tourists can actually stay in for the night. These shukubos are a great way to fully experience your time in Koya-san and you are even given the opportunity to take part in the morning religious ceremony. Jame and I decided not to stay in a shukubo this time, but we will definitely do so sometime while we are here as we'd really like to go back in the winter or spring.

Once we got off the cable car we hopped onto a bus to head into town. The bus was jam packed and the ride was very, very windy. We chose a random bus-stop, got off, and proceeded to walk around town. It was kind of funny because just as we got off the bus and turned the corner the very first thing we saw was this cherry red Ferrari. We were wondering whose it was and then we saw this old man limp over to the driver's seat. We were staring at the car and honestly couldn't believe it belonged to the old man. We wanted to get a picture of it with him, but an elderly lady stopped him to chat. Of course we didn't want to bother him, so as we were admiring the car a lady from a nearby shop caught wind of this and came outside offering to take our picture with it.


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