Day 6: Manga Museum and Fushimi-Inari Taisha

We spent the morning at the Kyoto's Manga Museum which is just around the corner from the hotel we're staying at (The Hotel Monteray Kyoto). It has a huge library of manga books in Japanese and smaller collections in some other languages. The best part was the history of manga room but there wasn't a huge amount else to see for a non-Japanese speaker. Luckily it was only cost a few hundred yen to look round.

In the afternoon we took a short train ride to Inari to see the Fushimi-Inari Taisha temple. This was one of the places I'd most wanted to see. It has thousands of bright orange Torii (the distinctive Shinto gates) forming a 5km path up the mountainside. I don't remember it, but apparently it was used in the filming of Memoirs of a Geisha. The heat was too high to get all the way up the mountain but we spent an hour or so walking around.



It was pretty dark and overcast whilst we were there and I could only get handheld pictures with the ISO1600 setting, so there's a lot of noise in the photos taken inside the Torii. There were also plenty of these creepy fox statues all over the hillside:



There were several temples on the hills with pools for the cleansing ceremony: