Arashiyama at the Peak of Autumn Colors

I’ve actually been meaning to go to Arashiyama for about a month now but kept getting delayed.  Earlier in November the forecast showed rain on the days I had intended to go two weeks in a row.  Another time I had to prepare for my first speech in Japanese class.  But everything worked out; the trees change colors much later here because it’s warmer here than at home.  There are still lots of threes that are completely green in our city.

If there was one drawback to going this weekend, it was the unbelievable number of people.  Arashiyama draws crowds  year round, but autumn colors season is second only to spring sakura season in Kyoto.  The trains from Makino, my home station, to the JR station in Arashiyama were incredibly packed.  I transferred four times and even the subways were more populated than usual.  I spent my entire limited express ride from home to Sanjo station squished like a sardine and I stood on the subway because there were absolutely no seats, which is unusual as far as my experiences go.  The trains from Nijo station to the station in Arashiyama were just as packed and sardine-tin like as my first ride.  It doesn’t really bother me, but it’s always interesting when I’m the only obvious foreigner packed in and as nonplussed as the locals because sometimes I catch people looking at me to see if I’m used to the trains.  Three months, a trip to Tokyo, and hours on other trains into my life in Japan, I don’t feel much about trains will surprise me anymore.  Unless they start running more than two minutes late.

It was a bit cloudy at times, making it a bit chilly with the breeze off of the water, but it was still warm for what I consider to be normal end-of-November weather.

To be honest, none of my photography (or the professional souvenir prints you can buy in the area, for that matter) truly do the sight justice, but I feel that this one is one of the closest:

I spent several hours just walking the area.  There are several temples and a monkey park I didn’t get around to visiting, but walking even some of the trails was more than enough for one afternoon.

Though I wasn’t in the monkey park, there were still signs on the mountain warning tourists about the monkeys, as they can be dangerous:

It’s hard for me to describe how vast this looked in real life.  Especially for someone who has always lived in the flatlands of the Midwest, mountains feel so incredibly and incomprehensibly large.

As the afternoon pressed on, the light started to filter through the leaves, creating a stunning canopy.

I actually got a little lost trying to find the train station, but I ended up finding the bamboo forest I wanted to walk through anyway, so it turned out alright.  Especially since I remembered the train station being very close to the entrance of the forest.  Unfortunately, I missed a turn somewhere and ended up walking twenty minutes past the station, ended up on some side streets outside the Arashiyama area.  But I had a map and my Japanese, so I found the station pretty quickly, which was just as packed as it had been when I had arrived in the morning.