Kamakura - day 4

This morning we had to get up very early to catch our train to Kamakura. What we hadn't counted on, is that we would have to take the subway to Shinjuku (= busiest station in the world at rush hour) at rush hour! We had to take all our luggage with us because we were leaving that same night to Kyoto from Shinjuku station. So, the first metro got there and was packed with business people, but luckily we managed to hop on. The next metro we took wasn't too bad either because all the people got off where we got on. But when we got to Shinjuku, it was crazy! There were people EVERYWHERE! Anyway, we got our train to Fujisawa and managed to stuff our luggage into a locker there, making it much more bearable to walk around! Then we took a train from Fujisawa to Hase that passed by the coast and the beaches and that went right through the middle of houses, as if they had been built against the train. We got off to see the Giant Buddha (13,5 meters high) and another temple in the area which was very nice and even had some caves you could walk through. We got back on the train and went to








Kamakura where we stopped at a sushi-belt restaurant in the city centre. The sushis were delicious!! After lunch we continued walking to another temple. And then to another temple. And then to another one... and so on. It sounds like they're all right next to each other, but we walked for kilometers in the sun, soaking in sweat and buying water bottles every 500 meters (one really good thing about Japan is that they have drink vending machines everywhere, in every street!). One of the temples (Hokokuji) had a really nice bamboo garden and another one (Kenchoji) was the oldest Zen training monastery in Japan (or something like that). All of them were very nice, but after walking for so long, we decided to go back to Fujisawa instead of visiting another 15 or so temples. From Fujisawa we took the train back to Shinjuku and witnessed the afternoon rush hour... we saw people being pushed and forced into the trains by the station staff! That's something you would never see in Europe! Anyway, once in Shinjuku we sat down in the bus station and played cards for hours waiting for the night bus that would take us to Kyoto. It finally left at midnight...



Weather: very very hot and sunny...