Japan Day six - Monkey Mayhem

On day six in Japan it was time to visit the "Japanese snow monkey's" except these little guys weren't actually living in the snow, they were living in a park in Kyoto. The "colony" of monkey's is a little bit like a reserve, the monkey's are really used to people but at the same time they are still wild animals not caged animals. They are really amazing to watch and you even have the opportunity to feed the monkeys. The monkey's seem to be fairly uninterested in people (except for when you're feeding them of course!) and just go about their lives. This place was really amazing and a lot of fun, I think it was my favourite thing in Japan.












After spending some time with the monkey's we decided to go for a walk along the river near the park as it was really peaceful after all the madness of Tokyo. Along the river we saw lots of sign's pointing towards a temple so we thought we'd check it out, the walk was much longer than I originally thought but that was ok as it was nice to be out in the fresh air! When we finally arrived we found a quiet and pretty shrine on top of a hill with an amazing view of the city - it was so nice to be somewhere like this that wasn't completely over run with tourists.




In the evening we decided to have a look around Gion, a very important historic area of Kyoto which sometimes feels like stepping back in time there are a lot of cobbled streets and winding lanes. Apparently if you're lucky you might see a geisha in Gion but we didn't see any - I think the geisha's would actually be a little scared of stepping outside as there are so many tourists waiting with camera's to take photos.




We decided to head home but on the way home we came across the most amazing and exciting thing ever. A New Zealand themed cafe, complete with fish and chips. We had already had dinner but I couldn't let this opportunity to have hokey pokey ice cream pass me by. We were so excited about this cafe!