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2006-04-japan
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2006-04-15
I took the train from Namba station in Osaka to Mount Koya. The train was pretty packed and everybody seemed to go to Mount Koya, so I was getting a bit worried about accommodation. But the tourist information organized a room at Fudoin. It was not cheap at 12000yen but it turned out to be a really nice room. I walked around Koya-san the rest of the afternoon. It was not all fun I must say, it was pretty cold (6 degrees it said somewhere) and rainy as well. I looked around for a restaurant, but they were all closed, well at least after 2 o'clock. And the one museum I went to had no heating, urgghh. Anyways, I saw pretty much everything: Kongobu-ji, Danjogaran, Fudo-do, Daimon (gate), Reihokan (Treasure House) (the museum) and finally Okuno-in (temple and necropolis). The necropolis was the nicest actually, lots of mossy burial stones along a path (more than 2 km long I think) and at the end the Okuno-in Temple. Okuno-in has 11000 lanterns burning, of which 2 supposedly since the 11th century.
Below the trees of Okuno-in it was already less cold, but still my room at Fudoin was super warm. Definitely, the nicest traditional Japanese room I stayed in, I even had my own western toilet. Diner was in a different room, by myself, but with a great view of the garden. After diner I went for another quick walk in Okuno-in, I read in some blog about that but I did not find it that interesting because in the darkness there was just less to see. So I was back at the monastery in time to sit in bath, very nice after a long cold day.
"Set amid clumps of black cedar at an altitude of 900 m in the heart of the Kii Peninsula, Mount Koya, or Koya-san, is Japan's most venerated Shingon-Buddhist site. It is host to over one million pilgrims a year. Saint Kukai (774-835), also known by his post-humous name, Kobo Daishi, established a monastic retreat here in 816. There were almost a thousand temples on the mountain by the Edo period, but typhoons and fire have since reduced the number to 123."
