The journey to Koyasan was my first trip on the private railway; the first train was like any other, the second though provided some lovely views of the beautiful scenery as we crept up the mountain and the cable car was a unique experience, feeling like the slow creep at the start of a roller-coaster. The trip was through Nankai rather than JR and so wasn’t included in the travel pass but they offered a Heritage ticket which covered all the travel including the rail, cable car and buses as well as providing discounts such as 20% off at the temples too.
The great thing about this was it lowered the price of entry to Kongobuji making it a no-brainer as it cost only 400 yen. At this point in my trip, I’ve started questioning going into the temples a little more as it’s started to feel like going through the motions where the experiences aren’t that memorable; on one hand you don’t want to miss out after coming all this way, but also I want to be enjoying the experiences and not doing them for the sake of it. Kongobuji was a low cost though and an experience I enjoyed; which was great.
Sadly no photos were allowed in most of the area; leaving it to my memory to preserve the experience! The route started with walking around some of the temple and seeing some of the smaller rock gardens, then we saw how the interiors were decorated with intricate paintings on the paper walls and then this led onto some larger rock gardens.
There had been a turning though half way through which I went to look down and I was glad I did; this took me to a hall where they gave free green tea and rice crackers and a monk also started talking to the audience, sadly, I couldn’t understand but even so it was interesting to sit there and let what he was saying flow over.
The end of the tour went through some more rooms where they had some displays again.