there and back again

D1000006 (Small)
Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

On tuesday we were going to catch up on sleep, and all the little jobs we'd been putting off for the last week, but I got a call from Cory, one of the other teachers here; he had a day off as there was a national holiday, and did we fancy doing something? We did, and he duly drove over and we went to the Aono-Domon cave. It's a really long tunnel, which a monk carved into a mountain after the woman he loved fell off on the way to the temple on the other side. The tunnel is really impressive; however there's a road through it now, which meant that we drove through it in about 20 seconds. Impressive, nonetheless. Then, we parked up, saw the best pimped-out van so far (see flickr), and then started the climb to what we thought was Rakanji Temple, which has hundreds of stone Buddha statues, and is by all accounts wonderful. There were a few on the way up, but then the walk quickly turned into a climb (interspersed with a few rounds of aeroplane racing and golf - videos to come). We came down 2 -and-a-half hours later having found no more than a smattering of statues and nearly fallen off our own cliffs, and it wasn't until about 8 hours later, in the bar, that we found out that the actual temple was on another mountain, about a kilometre away. Ho hum...