The Kyoto Trail (京都一周トレイル) : Day 1

Our Kyoto Trail thru-hike started today.
We left Kobe city and traveled to Kyoto yesterday to really start our three month-long hike.
The first part of it is to walk the entire routes of Kyoto Trail in one go.
Kyoto Trail has been around way before the current “long-distance trail boom” in Japan and it connects all the mountains and hills surrounding the east, north and west side of Kyoto city.
When you walk the trail in the numerical order of the sign posts, the starting point is the East trailhead sign which is located right in front of Fushimimomoyama station. Then the trail goes around the city in counterclock-wise.
Our first day was from the trailhead to Keage Station area for a bit more than 18km.
Unexpectedly, we were very impressed and loved the trail.
Most surprising fact was pretty big parts of the trail, way much more than we expected, were either unpaved or natural surface. The route was very well drawn to lead us to pass by many tourists destinations without unnecessary or too much uphills and downhills.
The scenics along the trail were so diverse that we didn’t get tired at all.
The trail was so well-marked and the signposts stands every single corner you have to make direction changes, even in the forests. Though we had guidebooks and official maps, one could walk on the trail just by following the sigh posts.
Since it is Kyoto, signs were almost always bilingual of English and Japanese.
We didn’t have any problem to find vending machines and bathrooms along the way for today’s part. They were literally everywhere.
On the way to the famous Fushimi Inari shrine from Fushimi Momoyama castle, we walked through a big bamboo forests that has no one else but us walking around. We stopped by some temples and enjoyed great views of Kyoto city from many observation points.
Since mountains and hills around Kyoto city is, I believe, the private property of temples, they are covered with natural local tree forests, no monotonous artificially planted cider/cypress tree forests.
It should take 8 or 9 days for us to complete walking the entire 132 kilometer-long trail.
We are really looking forward to see what other good things comes along the trail ahead of us.