Uji is a small city that sits between Kyoto and Nara. We didn’t visit this city in our 2010 trip, and thus included it in for this year. And we’re glad we did! Uji is particularly famous for its Green Tea products – including snacks, beverages, and ice-cream, so we set aside time to explore the street where shops that offer these items can be found.
Uji-Bashi Bridge and Byondo-in Street are situated in the same area, so you can easily include both in the same visit. The area is about a 15 minutes walk from Uji station. The main bridge itself sees vehicular traffic in both directions, but you’d get really pretty views of Uji River, like in this picture immediately below:
Continuing onto the Street, and stopping for Green Tea soft-serve ice-cream. The cone versions cost ¥400 – the kids certainly thought it worth it. The cafe we were at also whips up green tea gyozas and ramen (!).
Matcha fix done, we continued onto explore the street. The street isn’t that long a stretch: perhaps just 100 meters, and there’s a Starbucks at the end where the temple grounds entrance also is. I was expecting the street and area to be pretty crowded, but it was anything but: there were small groups of visitors here and there, but the experience was fairly quiet and laid back otherwise. You can probably spend an hour exploring just this street, including time to snack on the Green Tea delicacies, before you’d want to also move on.
Onto Uji Prefecture Park. Continued in the next post!