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Sleep in a temple on Mount Koya

A place: Japan

Koyasan is a mountain town of more than a hundred temples, and about fifty of them take guests. You sleep on a futon on tatami, eat a vegetarian dinner the monks call shojin ryori, and are woken before six for morning prayers in a hall that smells of incense and cold wood. Afterwards, walk through Okunoin, a cemetery of two hundred thousand graves under cedars, early enough that you are the only one there. It is not a retreat. It is a night in somebody else's routine.

Practical

Cost
$130–260 a night, two meals
Best time
All year; snow in winter
Difficulty
Easy
Time it takes
One night
What people get wrong
Arriving after the evening meal time. Temples serve dinner early and will not hold it.

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