It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What adventure from 2025 will be forever etched upon your memory?

It would be super simple sitting here less than a month after spending most of November in Japan to just write… Japan! with a huge exclamation mark and move on to the next post (heck knows these days leading in the holidays are busy and I have things I should be doing besides writing daily blog posts… whose idea was this blog-every-day thing anyway!?)

But let me tell you how I spent my birthday. In Kyoto.

There are almost countless shrines and temples in Japan, but one up on the side of a small mountain in Kyoto called Kiyomizu-dera was a short walk from our new hotel. We had woken up in a traditional-style hotel near the Kyoto train station but had moved to an apartment style hotel a couple klicks away (for cost and location reasons—all booked months ago).

My birthday was on a Sunday and it just happened to be the weekend that the Kiyomizu-dera temple switched to its autumn hours—counter-intuitively open later in the autumn because their grounds happened to host a large grove of Japanese maple trees which turn a beautiful hue of red. They light them up from multiple angles so that the temple and the grove become a magic place of enchanting lights and shapes and shadows.

We decided to go up there to have a look after dinner. 

Every person in Kyoto was also trying to get up there, apparently. 

There is one narrow street lined with various shops selling souvenirs and foods and often both, and the street being about three meters wide it would comfortably accommodate a good few thousand people an hour walking up to the tempe itself.  Rough guess? At least ten thousand people were up there. 

It took us nearly an hour to walk—shuffle—the kilometre-ish distance up from our hotel street to the temple gates, and then another hour to slowly make our way through the sea of people towards the grove of trees.

The sight was worth the effort tho.

We amazingly found a bench and remember we just sat there in the shadow and glow of a huge maple astride a pond with the pagoda temple looming above, all of it like a fire of reds and oranges, and we just… sat there. Sat there and took it all in, kinda the pinnacle of this vacation we were taking and this quiet moment in a crowd of thousands. And somehow it had taken me exactly forty nine years and millions choices to get to this exact spot.

And now etched permanently on my memory.