Japan, Day Ten: Koyasan

In the morning we left Kyoto for the mountain town of Koyasan, the journey to which required three trains, a cable car, and a bus. There aren't many connections, either, so I was kind of stressed figuring this all out. Because it's Japan, though, everything went off without a hitch and we reached Koyasan by mid-day. 

All the lodgings in Koyasan are Buddhist temples. We stayed at Kumagaiji, founded around eight hundred years ago.

A monk met us upon arrival and took us straight to our room even though it was early in the day. He gave us tea and a snack, and went over the policies of the monastery, including meal times and the early morning ceremonies to which we were invited. Like the guest houses in Magome, the walls are thin here - our room even had an open window into the hallway, with only a sliding paper door to close - but it was always dead silent. People can be really considerate when society pressures them into it.

Our room looked out onto the garden.

The main street of town is lined with many other monasteries - it was a bit bigger overall than I expected.

It was also blessedly cool, in the upper 60s. After three days in the swamp of Kyoto this felt amazing.

We found a place for lunch and ate all this stuff.

We had no real plan for what to do here, so we set out to walk toward something called "Koyasan Forest Park."

We came across a deserted, mostly empty cemetery about halfway through the walk.

This was an extremely beautiful setting, ringed on all sides by forest. A little eerie, though, with all the empty space between graves.

We never did find the Forest Park, but we kept walking (past all these signs that google translate told us meant "do not enter," but we figured that was intended for cars).

Before the cemetery, the road was mostly through town, but soon afterward it became a narrow path through absolutely enormous trees.

I haven't seen trees like this since Sequoia National Park.

As it turned out, the road we were on spilled out into Okunoin Cemetery, Koyasan's most famous site.

Okunoin is an ancient Buddhist cemetery that goes on for more than 2 kilometers, with 200,000 moss-covered stone monuments. On and on through the forest.

Many of the statues are wearing clothes - we found out later this is a specific deity dedicated to lost children. 

This is the largest monument in the cemetery.

I don't know if there's any other place like this in the world, but I know I've never seen anything like it. Silent and majestic and beautiful.

All the monasteries cook you a traditional (vegan) Buddhist dinner, so we ate (promptly at 5:30pm!) and then headed back out to the cemetery to see it at night.

All the slippers were always perfectly lined up for us to wear to our rooms!