#Wakayama

Kōyasan is right in the heart of Wakayama and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We got to this remote area after a long trip by train and funicular.

Shingon Buddhism was founded here way back in 805. Today, alongside loads of temples, it’s also home to Japan’s biggest cemetery. You can even stay the night in a monastery, with vegetarian monk food and group prayers thrown in.

The place is massive and pretty much impossible to cover in just an afternoon. It definitely deserves its own blog post. For today, a few photos will have to do for a first impression.

We got back to the hotel way too late. Tomorrow we’re off to the second-to-last stop on our trip: Kyōto.

We arrived early in Ōsaka and had time to kill while waiting for our room. So we headed to the city of Wakayama to check out the castle there.

Before that, though, we took a special train to a special station in the little village of Kishi. The cool thing about this station is that it’s run by a cat. Nitama, as she’s called, is the official stationmaster and in charge of the staff. It seems like a pretty chilled job, as she mostly just lies around the station letting tourists take photos of her. Nitama (meaning “Tama the Second”) is the successor to the previous station cat named Tama, who sadly passed away in 2015.

Inside the station, there’s a café and a little shop selling Tama souvenirs. Plus, there are special trains running on the line between Wakayama and Nishi, each decorated differently. One of them is a museum carriage, which unfortunately we didn’t have time to actually go inside, so we could only take photos from the outside.