---
title: 'Last Morning in Arashiyama'
date: '2026-03-31 07:30'
template: entry
published: true
hero_image: 'bamboo.jpg'
lat: '35.0094'
lng: '135.6728'
location_city: 'Kyoto'
location_country: 'Japan'
weather_temp_c: 13
weather_desc: 'Partly cloudy'
---

The alarm went off at 6am and I almost ignored it. Then I remembered why I had set it: Arashiyama before the crowds arrive.

By 7am the bamboo grove was quiet. Not silent — bamboo is never silent, the stalks creak and the leaves hiss against each other in any breeze at all — but quiet in the sense of no one else being there. An hour later there would be tour groups and selfie sticks and the particular difficulty of appreciating something beautiful while surrounded by people also trying to appreciate it. At 7am there was just the grove and the green light filtering down through the canopy and a single cat sitting very still on a stone wall watching me with professional indifference.

I walked the main path twice. The stalks are taller than I expected, 15 or 20 metres, and they grow so densely that the sky mostly disappears. The colour is extraordinary: not one green but twenty, each stalk a slightly different shade depending on age and light, the whole thing shifting as the breeze moves through it.

The Oi River was flat and grey in the morning light, a single cormorant fishing from a low rock. Across the water the hills were still wrapped in low cloud. I sat on a bench and ate a convenience store onigiri and watched the mist burn off slowly.

Flight to Seoul at 2pm. Packing takes twenty minutes when you never properly unpack.
