Arashiyama is a suburb region of Kyoto in Japan. Arashiyama is a popular tourist area due to its famous bamboo forest and many people love to take beautiful bamboo photos and selfies here. Other than the bamboo forest, a bridge also goes across the river. Tourist could hire people to take them upstream along the river on a small boat. Along the river, Family Mart and Lawson also sell beers and food on a boat to serve people riding the boat on the river.
We headed to Arashiyama from Kyoto station. We left very early at 7AM in the morning in order to avoid the crowd. We took the San-In JR line from Kyoto station all the way to Saga-Arashiyama. Alternatively, you could take Keifuku train as well, but it is not covered by JR Pass.
The bamboo forest is about 10 minutes away from Saga-Arashiyama station. When we got there, there were already small crowd of people there, but it was still manageable to get some good photos without getting photo bombed.
The bamboo forest was not very big either. We finished taking photos and walked every place here within 30 minutes. We then headed to the main street where the shops are to check out the souvenirs and snacks. Most of the shops open at 9AM in the morning.
The Arashiyama district area was not very big. Once you cross the bridge there was not anything else there. We pretty much finished visiting all the shops within an hour. While we cross the bridge, we could see people riding boats upstream along the river. We did not do this since we had no interest in it.
There were also few temples such as Tenryunji Temple. It seemed to be a Buddhist temple. We just walked around as there was not much to see. In addition, use of tripod was not allowed inside the temple.
There was also this so called romantic mini train ride around Arashiyama, We did not think it's worth it to spend time riding this mini train. The ticketing office of this train is right by Saga-Arashiyama station and the reason we went there was to get some AC to cool us off.
Overall, half day was enough for us to visit the shops and the bamboo forest at Arahiyama. After lunch time, we could see huge crowd of people at the bamboo forest and it was very difficult for people to take photo. So we recommend people to go there early in the morning to get some good photos.
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