Kyoto

Kyoto is the temple city, so you may as well start with the one you already have a photo of in your head.

Get to Fushimi Inari Taisha as early as you can physically manage. The Senbon Torii, the tunnel of vermilion gates climbing the hill, is the image everyone comes for and it earns it. Two useful facts: the shrine is free, and the grounds are open around the clock. So "go early" is an actual option here, not just advice you will ignore.

It will still be busy. What worked for us was leaving the main path for a smaller route we had seen on TikTok, and we came away with photos of an empty corridor of gates.

To confirmwhich path, and where exactly do you leave the main trail? This is the single most valuable line in the day. Something like "at the X junction, take the steps on the left instead of following the crowd right" is what makes people screenshot a guide.

To confirmdid you walk the full loop to the summit of Mount Inari, usually given as two to three hours return? If you turned back partway, say where and why.

From Inari, take the JR Nara Line one stop back towards Kyoto and get off at Tofukuji. Two things there, a few minutes apart on foot.

Komyo-in is a small subtemple with a dry garden that almost everyone walks straight past on the way to the main complex. It is quiet, it is cheap, and you can sit on the wooden veranda for as long as you want. This is the one I would tell a friend about.

Tsutenkyo, the covered wooden bridge, is inside the main Tofuku-ji grounds. It crosses a valley packed with maples, which tells you everything about when to go and when not to. In November this is one of the busiest paid sights in Kyoto and you queue for it. Any other month you have it nearly to yourself, green instead of red.

Spend the rest of the afternoon back in the centre around Teramachi and Shinkyogoku, the two covered arcades that run parallel to each other. For souvenirs, Loft is the one. Stationery, kitchen gadgets, packaging you will want to keep.

Head west, about twenty minutes from Kyoto Station on the JR Sagano Line to Saga-Arashiyama.

The bamboo grove is the postcard, and by ten in the morning it is also a slow moving queue of people filming themselves. Go at opening or skip it. It takes fifteen minutes to walk and it is genuinely beautiful when it is empty.

The real reason to come this far west is what sits above Arashiyama, and almost nobody walks up to it.

From the grove, follow Saga-Toriimoto, a preserved street of thatched machiya houses, uphill. About thirty minutes on foot, and the street itself is half the pleasure.

Adashino Nenbutsu-ji comes first. Thousands of small stone statues packed together in a field. They are not decoration. This was a burial ground, and the stones are memorials for people who died with nobody left to mourn them, gathered here at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a strange, quiet place.

Otagi Nenbutsu-ji is a few minutes further up and it is the one you will remember. Around 1,200 stone rakan, the disciples of the Buddha, scattered up a mossy hillside. Every single one is different. One holds a tennis racket. One has a cassette player. Two are sitting together sharing a drink.

I had this wrong when I first wrote it, so here is the correction. They were not carved by students. They were carved by ordinary visitors, amateurs with no training, between 1981 and 1991, under the guidance of the head priest Kocho Nishimura, who was also a sculptor. He told them to find the figure hiding in the stone rather than copy a model, which is exactly why the expressions are so unhinged and so good. The moss makes them look six hundred years old. They are barely forty.

Coming back down, there is a bus from the Otagidera-mae stop if your legs are finished.

Half a day door to door if you start early. We ate at a convenience store before heading back into the centre, which is not a confession, it is a recommendation.

In the afternoon, the second and final shopping round. We went to a knife shop to buy Japanese blades.

To confirmthe okonomiyaki place run by the former boxer turned farmer. Name, or at least the neighbourhood and a landmark. This is the best anecdote in the Kyoto section and right now a reader cannot find it.