Kamakura
Kamakura seaside city is a little over an hours train ride south of Tokyo. My friends & I had a marvellous day out exploring the wonderful temples and shrines. The header for this post shows my friend Kayo from Tokyo who was our guide for the day, also featured taking a selfie is Hamish Elton my friend from Thailand who was visiting Japan for the first time.
Engaku-ji Temple Kamakura
Our first stop was Engakuji Temple which is the head of a branch school of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism. It is very close to Kita-Kamakura station and houses the largest bell in Kamakura. Sadly we never got to see the big bell as that area was closed off, we had to settle for this smaller one. Check out my Engaku-ji photo blog here.
Cross the tracks to Kencho-ji Temple
This was the start of a huge day of walking, Hamish measured our steps and distance walked during the day with an app on his phone. We covered about 17 kilometres which was around 22,000 steps.
Kencho-ji Temple
Kenchoji Temple built in 1253 and is the oldest Zen training monastery in Japan. It is a lot smaller than during its heyday, Kencho-ji still has a large number of temple buildings, and stretches from the entrance gate at the bottom of the valley far into the forested hills behind. Check out my photo blog here on this fascinating Temple.
By now I’m getting hungry
it’s 2’30 pm and I’m dying of hunger so we start looking for a suitable restaurant. Spanish? No after all we are in Japan.
Amish
An Amish restaurant, I didn’t even know they had there own style of food. I’m surprised Hamish didn’t want to try it merely because of the rhyme. 🙂
Finally Japanese cuisine
And it turned out to be excellent, perhaps not quite Tokyo standard but very good indeed.
I love Japanese food
After lunch I had the strength to carry on with our marathon walk.
Through the tunnel to the Great Buddha
Little did I realise we had only covered about 1/2 of the 17 kilometres.
Kayo and Hamish take selfies with the Great Buddha
My friends taking selfies with the Great Buddha.
Here comes the priest
We watched this guy come down the stairs and wondered what he was up to. When he got to the bottom he spoke to a family who were illegally parked in the temples private car park and asked them to move on.
Hard to refuse this guy
He obviously has Buddha on his side. 🙂
Coffee time before heading for Enoshima
After spending several hours in Kamakura exploring the wonderful temples we decided to take a 30 minute train ride to Enoshima to see where Japan will hold the sailing venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
Map of Kamakura seaside city
At the bottom left hand corner south of Tokyo is Kamakura.
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Lotus at the Kara-mon at Engaku-ji Temple
Thanks for visiting my Kamakura seaside city post, I’ll finish with this photo which is one of my favourites among many on this great day out in Kamakura.
Checkout some more of my terrific blogs on the links below.
That’s all folks
