Colourful Kyoto

We woke up on Saturday morning rather hungover after the drunken karaoke scenes of the previous night.  After dragging ourselves out of bed we made it as far as the nearest McDonalds which perked us up sufficiently to leave Osaka and head to Kyoto.  We picked our Japanese Rail passes up at the station which allows us free rail travel on all JR lines (pretty much all trains) during our time in Japan.  We then collapsed onto the train and made the 20 minute journey north-east to Kyoto.

To be honest it was all a bit of a blur but we were rather proud of ourselves for making it before dark!  We hopped on the 206 bus, as instructed by the Hostelworld.com directions, and waited the obligatory 15 minutes.  Our stop hadn’t come up, so we thought me might be suffering in the Saturday afternoon traffic.  30 minutes into the journey and we finally realised all was not well.  We got off the bus and looked in a daze at the information on the stop.  None of it made much sense, what with it being in Japanese and all.  So we crossed the road to look for another bus stop.  Quite what we were doing I don’t know but I do know that when I saw a taxi and hailed it I felt much relief!  It turns out we were on completely the wrong side of town and (as we discovered the next day) had taken the bus in the wrong direction.  2,000 yen down, we trudged to our hostel and pretty much crashed out for the rest of the day!  We did make it out for a quick dinner of udon noodles, but that was about it!  We were staying in a 10 bed mixed dorm in Kyoto, which sounds fairly horrific, but we had a bunk bed with hospital-like curtains surrounding it so at least we could pass out in something like privacy! Click here to read more…