If it wasn't for them damned kids....

Friday 13th September - Koya-san

Zoiks!! It's Friday the 13th and we're off to stay in a deserted temple and visit an eerie necropolis. No, not robbed from a Scooby-doo episode but real life. For real.

Koya-san is a sacred temple-infested plateau reached by winding mountain train and then cable car. The views on the way up are, I understand, 'kinda fancy'. However, I was attempting to finish Ringworld by Larry Niven and missed the whole show.

Finish the book I did not, but we did reach the top and our rather dark looking subtemple lodgings. We were greeted by an old monk who was bent almost double and clearly had difficulty walking. He welcomed us, in a confidently spoken but almost impossible to follow English, and showed us to our room. Later he would serve us our dinner (a fine meal including steamed vegetables, white sesame tofu and some delicious but unnamed mame) and carry out most of the prayer service at 6.30am the next morning. Although we heard the activity of other people in the temple, aside from our man, we scarcely saw a soul the whole time we were there.

The next morning, at some ungodly hour, we headed out to Okuno-in, an enourmous ancient cemetary and the resting place of Kobo Daishi (where he meditates in his tomb, waiting for the future Buddha) the founder of Koya-san. The cemetary has over 200,000 moss covered graves shaded by 100-foot cypress trees and is most atmospheric. Stranger still is the practice of decorating some of the graves with hats and clothing, often in a seemingly rastafarian style.