Koyasan Vlog: Temple Stay, Japan’s Biggest Cemetery & Aoba Festival
We are now almost at our accommodation. We’ll try to early check in, if not possible,
at least leave our luggages here and start exploring the town. Every single corner,
every street so far looks amazing. It’s just a very peaceful place in the middle of the forest on the top of a mountain,
full of temples. It just looks amazing. – Hi!
– Hi! Yes. – Okay, thank you very much.
– Thank you so much. We checked into our room in the temple. We have the futon beds here, but the best part about this room must be behind these doors. I haven’t seen it either yet. This is the map of the temple. Our room is here and today at 6pm we will be having dinner in this room, which is here. And tomorrow at 7:00am in the main temple, we will have a morning prayer
and at 7:45 in the same room, over there, we will be having our breakfast. There is no private toilet or shower, but there is an onsen that we can use. Usually, in these temples, there is a curfew as well at night, but in this one, apparently,
there is like a side gate for service which is open 24 hours, but the main gate will be closed at 9pm. I think this actually might be one of
the advantages of being here in June. It’s the rainy season, and I think the rain is actually
contributing to the view. So much better. You wanted to see where this goes.
Do you wanna check it out? Yeah, let’s go. It is Kiyotaka* Inari Shrine,
100 meters away. – This looks super cool.
– It looks very nice. – Let’s go.
– Let’s go. The tree on the left is a cedar, and the right one is a cypress. You look above. They look like they are supporting
and leaning on each other. Make a wish and
the legend says it comes true. Since most of the temples
were closing around 5, we were already too late
to be admitted at 4:30. So, we decided to just
come back the next day, and for now, have a look at
the temple from the outside, and just walk around the city,
enjoying the rainy streets. When we got back to our temple,
we had a little rest, and then later, headed to our
private room for dinner. The presentation of the food was amazing. Full of colourful ingredients,
placed very carefully on the plates. When it came to the flavours, some we actually liked a lot even though
they were very muted and very clean flavours, others we were not much of a fan, but we were still very happy to have the experience of having Buddhist food
in a temple prepared by monks. After dinner, we took a bath at the onsen and got one more stamp at the temple
and then called it a night in anticipation of the early start
we would be having the next day. It is almost 7 in the morning, and we are ready for the morning prayer. So, we will be going there now. We’re going to the big cemetery now. We had breakfast and we will take a bus because it’s kind of like
half an hour of walking away. On the way back, we might just
walk back or again take a bus. We will see about that, and the parade today should
be starting around noon. By that time, we will also try to
visit some of the main temples here. We are at Okunoin Cemetery now. We will spend quite some time here. We found another stamp point maybe. Maybe, but I don’t think it’s a stamp point. – I think it’s some writing in it as well.
– Something. Probably. Some sort of I think religious… …something. I don’t know. We’ll see. And you can collect this from each temple. – They all have their own
brushes and stamps I think. – Yes. – She liked my notebook.
– She liked it? – Yeah. And you need to respectfully, I think, – There is also another stamp.
– keep them as… …they are blessed and they are special.
– Yes. There’s one more stamp there.
Let’s get that one, too. You lit it from the big candle. Thank you, thank you. A dog? Where are you from? – Turkey, Hungary.
– Of course. – Hungary?
– Yes. Hungary, Turkey. – Nice to meet you.
– Welcome to Japan! – Thank you, thank you so much.
– Thank you so much, thank you. – Have a good day! Bye bye!
– Bye! Told you you have become famous. No, he was taking your photos.
I kind of approved, with a head nod,
and then stepped a bit away. – I mean it’s from the back, so I think that’s
completely fine. – Yeah yeah. No, it’s fine. But now then it was mostly
also about your tattoos. Okay, so we have been invited to a car, and we will go with our
new friends to the town. I think it’s the blue one. Then now, we couldn’t
explore most of the cemetery. – We can go back.
We’re saving some time from here. – Yes. – We see the parade,
we try to see 1-2 temples, main ones. – Yes. By 3pm at the latest then… – And then we–
– Now we have– Because we have to find an
alternative way to go back, I think we just take our
bags from the temple, the accommodation we’re
staying at, and bus, cable car, – Train to Osaka, train to Kyoto.
– Yeah. And our luggages by the way
made it to the hotel [in Kyoto] just now. – Yep, with our friends,
– Time to get murdered. we’re going to the town.
We don’t know their names yet because we’re using Google Translate
to talk to each other. Now we’re parked, we go. Thank you. Okay, so we will have some coffee
because there is some time left. This is what they wrote and we
have a big big big language barrier because like we came,
and then, I don’t wanna. – You know, I don’t wanna…
– I don’t wanna shoot anything. I don’t wanna bother them. I don’t wanna just like– they–
Maybe they just wanted to drive us here, and then we are like just
following them everywhere. So, I wanted to thank. When I wrote it,
he didn’t read it by the way. He just wanted to say that
‘let’s have some coffee’. So, we will have some coffee.
Coffee sounds good. – We need some coffee as well.
– Yeah. Let’s go. Our new friends very kindly invited us for a
coffee while waiting for the parade to start, and with the magic of Google Translate, we managed to have a really nice and long chat
with them about their travels, or what are they doing in Koyasan, and just in general shared a lot
of nice topics with each other. We had our coffee,
had some nice conversations. We are now outside the same cafe
and waiting for the parade to come here. We don’t know what it is.
We give money, we take it. – Thank you very much.
– Thank you very much. – Okay, thank you.
– Thank you. I don’t know what it is we got. They look like Avatar. It’s so cute. I feel like that’s the end of it. We will go back, take our bags
and then walk to the temples, and maybe we will see that– – We will see one of the temples
at least, properly. – Hopefully. And then, we will try to catch
our train latest by 3:45. Our friend is there. Look at this. – I wanna get it because this is cute
– I think it’s just a fried rice cake. – Yeah.
– Plain. I was saying we are so
behind our schedule. We haven’t really seen a
lot of the main things, but we had a great day. – Alma got so many presents.
– Should I get 2 [in Turkish]? So many presents. The bracelet, which we
will be able to show later. It was given as a present
to the guy that we met? – Yes.
– And it’s from Tibet, right? – Yes.
– And then now you have it. – Exactly. – And you also have
so many nice festival cards, I will call them because I
don’t know what they are yet. Show it, show it, show it.
Look at this! It’s just plain rice I think.
You look alike, huh? Okay. – It’s kind of just–
– It looks savoury, but you never know. – It’s kind of sweet.
– Kind of sweet, cool. Do you– why would you? I was going to ask if you ever had like
the communion wafer at a mass. Why would you have had? But it tastes like that with sugar. I’m gonna eat her head. Aah, this is that [in Turkish]. In Turkey, the thing that you
put the ice cream in between. Ice cream wafer [in Turkish]. Why is it so huge [in Turkish]? I think it’s not very obvious how big it is
in the camera. Can you go stand next to it? – People are standing next to it.
– It doesn’t count. We gotta compare it to you.
People know your height. They don’t. You can tell them. How ‘high’ are you?
How tall are you? Not enough. Alma is in her line for another stamp. – Alma. – Hmm.
– What’s up? – Nothing. What are you going for? – What are you waiting for?
– For a stamp. – What happened? – Did they stamp it
in the wrong place[in Turkish]? No, okay. – Did you speak Turkish for a second again?
– Yes. – So that I don’t understand?
– Go away [in Turkish]. – Uhu, why? You came to make fun of
me because I drop things. I didn’t even see that,
but now I know that you dropped things. – When did you drop them?
– I didn’t. Is this why you interacted
with other people? – Yes.
– I heard you interacting with other people. I wasn’t–
I was shooting the building. The bus we will take from here to Koyasan
cable car departs at 3:54. It’s right now almost 2pm. So, we actually have some time to snack before taking the trains and buses
and cable cars and everything. So, that’s a good thing.
We have seen– Well, we have like three
things to see in our list here. We had like three things to see, and we have seen two of them now, and only Daimon Gate is left,
which is quite close to us right now, but I think we should first eat some stuff. Alma is still in the line. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Okay, for the road, we got some egg sandwich.
What else did we get? – We got some salad.
– We got some salad. We got marinated eggs. Nutty bar. We got– I got a dessert. We got– – We got this one.
– What’s this [in Turkish]? This, I don’t know.
I saw this in temples as well. There is like a paper in it. You pull it out, and then, there is a
fortune and gives you an advice as well, or advice spiritually comes.
I don’t know. Okay, good. Okay. Some cafe food and some coffee, maybe. – Yes.
– Let’s go. The cafe was sadly not open. So, we just resorted to eating
whatever we had got from Family Mart, and then, we went to see the Daimon Gate, and after that, we were off to Kyoto. Long long long journey. If you like our content,
please like & subscribe. 🙂
Hi everyone,
We are Alma (Hungarian) and Buğra (Turkish), currently living in Berlin and often travelling around the world. On our YouTube channel and Instagram page, we share lifestyle- and travel-related content.
In this vlog, we stay in an amazing temple in Koyasan, visit Japan’s biggest cemetery (Okunoin), make local friends and get to see the Aoba Matsuri (Festival)! If Koyasan is in your to-see list, it has more to offer than you’d think. Watch this peaceful vlog to find out!
Our accommodation: https://www.booking.com/Share-0SAlc0f (recommendation, not an ad).
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Temple Stay
2:44 Kiyotaka Inari Shrine
4:01 Other Temples & Koyasan
4:42 Temple Dinner
5:29 Morning Prayer
6:17 Okunoin Cemetery
9:20 Making Friends
12:20 Aoba Festival
15:43 More Temples & Shrines
18:18 Family Mart
19:00 Daimon Gate
19:27 Outro
All our videos are available with English captions and Turkish subtitles.
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