Day 1 Continued further

As I mentioned before, because of the start of school, I just do not have time to sort out which temple is which. This is the only day with the problem because we visited seven temples. On other days it was only one or two, many times even none.

This is the entrance gate to a very small temple that did not seem very prosperous even though it is one of the 88 and has large numbers of people stopping there.

This was a red Buddha on a porch at the side of a small building. The red color has all sorts of symbolism associated with it - too much to go into here. The purple cloth contains the names of four people in the bottom left and the writing in the center is about some organization having some thing on a specific day. I can't see enough of it to understand and at the time it did note impress me enough to make notes or photograph it.
This is one of the buildings associated with a temple. Notice the figure at the top. It is very unusual and I did not see anything else resembling it at any of the other temples. If we had had more time, I would have tried to find out about it.

The gate of another of the temples. The main hall is directly inside and the grounds were fairly small and very old looking, at least the part that we could get into. There obviously were some newer building at the back of the compound and we could see them as we approached (see the next photo). The vertical boards in the fence have the names of people who donated money to the temple written on them.

We came out of a path through the low hills and found that we were at the rear of the temple. On the right you can see a grave yard and the temple building are on the left. The gate in the above picture was reached by following the path and making a left at the last building. I am not sure but I had the impression that there may have been a number of monks living here.

This is the gate into another of the temples. The large stone in the middle of the road is typically Japanese. Either there will be something carved into stone (the name of a Buddha or famous person, a poem, or part of a sutra, for example) or there will be some legend about the stone or something that happened near it. In this case there will usually be a sign board explaining, as there is in this case. However, we did not have time to spot and read, let alone followup with notes.

This picture is typical of the sort of roads that we walked on the first day. As you can see, it is an actual road but a back road with little or no traffic.

We saw these red berries and stopped to look at them. Two other Ohenro-san also stopped and there was a fruitless debate about the name of the plant. After everyone had taken pictures we all went our separate ways. But as frequently happened, Ian and I stopped for lunch at a udon (noodle) shop and found the other two already there. The discussion about the name spread to all the customers and finally the waitress went into the back and came out with a plant identification book. I don't remember the name - it was Japanese anyway and would not mean anything - but the berries certainly were pretty.