Day 02 @ Uji – Uji-Bashi Bridge and Byondo-in Street

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Uji is a small city that sits between Kyoto and Nara. We didn’t visit this city during our 2010 trip, and thus included it 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 offering these items can be found.

Uji-Bashi Bridge and Byodo-in Street are situated in the same area, so you can easily include both in the same visit. The area is about a 15-minute walk from Uji Station. The main bridge itself sees vehicular traffic in both directions, but you’d get really pretty views of the Uji River, like in this picture immediately below:

Sunny weather in the early afternoon for pictures.
The bridge is fairly large, so there’s no jostling with crowds for vantage points to take pictures. The girls look like they are wearing matching jackets, but they’re actually different. The wife is wearing a jacket that we bought for our honeymoon 16 years ago, while H’s was picked up from Decathlon a month ago when we found she’d outgrown her winter wear from the 2019 trip.
There are stone steps from the top of the bridge that lead down to the river bank.

Continuing onto the street and stopping for green tea soft-serve ice-cream. The cone versions cost ¥400 – the kids certainly thought it was worth it. The cafe we were at also whips up green tea gyozas and ramen (!).

Matcha ramen and gyozas.
Matcha soft-serve ice-cream.
The kids approve. The little cafe has several sheltered tables for outdoor seating.
Matt having what looks like a matcha frappé.
One of several shops offering matcha-type items.
Looking for baking and cooking condiments.
The general area where we were. The matcha ice-cream shop we were at is right beside the spot marked Rokujoan.

Matcha fix done, we continued exploring 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 move on.

Onto Uji Prefecture Park. Continued in the next post!