Warning, walking tour, more temples, kaiseki

A word of warning to anyone booking hotel reservations through Precision Reservations. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to book a hotel early enough for Kyoto around July 17 and spent a lot of time searching online the week before. I made a reservation for a hotel via Precision Reservations but careful reading of the "confirmation" e-mails revealed that they had merely received my booking request and didn't secure a room for me. As it was for a booking less than 7 days in the future, they also needed my credit card number. However, their network was unable to give me up-to-date status information about room availability at the hotel I chose. I ended up cancelling as I was able to book a room at a different hotel.

Today (a week or so later), I received an e-mail saying that last-minute cancellations are charged a fee of one night! Apparently, this was in the fine print that I didn't read.

That's ridiculous. I suppose this is my own fault, but nowadays, any online reservation system that can't give you up-to-the-minute availability information is not worth the hassle.

I went on the Johnnie Hillwalker tour today. He's a local who gives guided walking tours of non-touristy places in Kyoto. Our group visited a lot of smaller Shinto shrines, neighbourhood artisans and the history of many streets and stores, e.g. we saw the original Nintendo office which used to make cardboard Japanese game cards. My only complaints were a large Spanish family who talked loudly throughout the whole tour (YMMV, of course) and the amount of time spent at some of the shrines (I'm not all that interested in Johnnie's family). There's several other accounts of this tour here and here.

Afterwards, I walked up to Kiyomizudera, a popular tourist site. The main hall has a huge balcony that is built over the hill and has nice views of Tokyo. There's also a waterfall that many people like to drink from.

Then, I walked back down the hill and found the steps marking the beginning of Sannenzaka a stone-paved path that leads to Maruyama Park. Lots of smaller vendors here too.

At night, I had a kaiseki dinner served to me in my room at the ryokan. Over a dozen beautiful small dishes of vegetables and fish in various preparations. I wished that they would have a description of all of the plates, but I suppose part of the appeal is that you get something different each time. My Flickr stream has more closeup photos of all the dishes.