October 25, 2025
Day 53 — Kyoto to Nara
Marilee here.
After three epic days coming out of the mountains, our legs were tired. We’d ridden about 90km each day since leaving Nakatsugawa, and I don’t even want to think about how much climbing was involved. So we were both looking forward to a day off, and with rain in the forecast we’d decided that taking a day in Nara to just laze around sounded perfect. But first we had to get there, so this morning it was back on the bikes once again.
For those readers who are wondering why temple enthusiasts like us are not spending even a single day in Kyoto — we had a wonderful stay in Kyoto several years ago with our kids, visiting so many temples that our two otherwise quite patient teenagers went on strike at the end. And based on our experiences so far at tourist areas like Nikko, Matsumoto castle and Magome on this trip, we knew that the Kyoto area would likely be a complete zoo: hordes of foreign tourists, enormous lineups and lots of shuffling along in a crowd. So we decided not to ruin our pleasant memories and to just give Kyoto a miss this time.
We’d managed to find an inexpensive guesthouse in the Arashimaya area of Kyoto, putting ourselves within easy reach of the Togetsukyo Bridge and the start of the Keinawa bike route, which we’d follow all the way to Nara.
A dedicated bike path! Even better: a FLAT dedicated bike path! We couldn’t believe our luck — this was just what our legs needed. The Keinawa bike path follows the Katsura river out of Kyoto and then hops over some bridges and runs along the Kizo river almost all the way into Nara.
Leaving Kyoto we rode along past soccer fields and baseball diamonds full of kids at their Saturday morning sports games, men biking with their fishing gear on their way to that secret riverbank spot, a few boys with butterfly nets beating the bushes in search of crickets, and one solitary oboe player tentatively sounding out a tune. And cyclists! Lots and lots of expensively geared up road cyclists were buzzing past us.
About halfway to Nara we took a break at a cyclists rest stop, shared a red bean paste-filled bun and watched the road bikes zooming by and the riders in their clickety-clackety racing shoes and Lycra singlets congregating around the bike racks. We weren’t in a hurry today — it was less than 50km from Kyoto to Nara and by 11am we’d already done half the distance.
A few kilometres outside of Nara we met a cycle tourist coming the opposite direction and stopped for a chat. She was a young German woman on a round the world adventure, and she had encouraging things to say about cycling in South Korea (where we hope to be next spring). Like us she was feeling overwhelmed by the number of tourists at the big spots — probably an occupational hazard for cyclists who spend a lot of the time alone in out of the way places. She warned us that we’d find Nara full of day trippers from Kyoto.
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As usual, the last few kilometres of the ride were the longest ever — uphill, against a headwind, and with a unique new challenge thrown in for extra measure: an obstacle course of bollards planted along the path. But we persevered and before long we were pushing our bikes through the throngs of tourists crowding the pedestrian shopping streets between the train station and the famous Nara deer park.
We had time to kill before we could check in to our guesthouse, so we found a table in a little square near the deer park, got some lunch from a nearby conbini and settled in for some people watching. There were signs warning that it was deer mating season and that the males could get “feisty”, but all the deer we saw seemed pretty calm. Before long we’d had enough and decided to try the guesthouse and see if we could wheedle our way into an early check-in.
The guesthouse was a traditional old home, with tatami floored rooms and rice paper sliding wall dividers. A few other groups of guests arrived at the same time as us, all of us barraging the flustered teenager on reception with questions and demands. In our case, it took some time to sort out the usual confusion about what to do with our bikes (we ended up just leaving them in the street overnight — not something we’d be comfortable with elsewhere, but ….. it’s Japan). Then it was off to the onsen!
Or rather, off to the sento — the difference being that an onsen has natural hot spring water, while a sento uses heated tap water (so really, just a public bath house). It was very small and definitely less luxe than some of the onsens we’ve visited, but had a nice neighborhood feel to it (and, on the women’s side, some nice neighborhood ladies who smiled and nodded and showed me how to work the shower knobs and warned me about the hot water tap (smoking hot!)).
By the time we got back to the guesthouse it had started raining and we felt so relaxed and sleepy we couldn’t contemplate leaving again, so we cobbled together a meal out of the dregs and leavings at the bottom of our food bag and called it a night. The plan for the next day called for a whole lot of doing nothing: we needed to rest up!
Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 2,766 km (1,718 miles)
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