Four days in Kyoto: two thousand temples, and time for eight

A temple on stilts over a wooded ravine, its main hall built out on a platform of wooden pillars with no nails in the joinery. Founded on a spring, which is what the name means, and still busy with people queuing to drink from it.

Built in 1605 by Tokugawa Ieyasu for the widow of his old rival Hideyoshi, which tells you something about how Japanese politics handled a defeated house. Small, quiet, and with a bamboo grove on the way out. It is lit at night in spring and autumn, and that version is worth planning around.

The public park at the bottom of the hill, entered through the Yasaka Shrine gate. Its weeping cherry is the most photographed tree in the city in April. Any other month it is simply where you sit down.

Gion for the machiya frontages, Pontochō for the alley by the river where the balconies come out in summer. Both have places with English menus at the front and places without a metre further in.

The head shrine of some forty thousand Inari shrines across Japan, dedicated to the rice and fox deity, with thousands of vermilion torii packed into tunnels up the hillside behind it. Each gate was paid for by a business; the donor's name is on the back, which is why the walk down looks completely different from the walk up.

A big Zen complex with a bridge over a maple ravine that turns the colour of a fire alarm in late November and is calm the rest of the year. The modernist dry gardens around the abbot's hall, laid out in 1939, are the reason to pay the second entry fee.

Noodle counters and a couple of good coffee places along the Keihan line between Tōfuku-ji and the museum quarter. Nothing famous, which is the point at this stage of the day.

A hall a hundred and twenty metres long, founded in 1164, holding 1,001 gilded wooden statues of Kannon in thirty-three bays, standing in rows in near darkness. No photography, no explanation needed, and half an hour in there resets the whole day.

Founded in 1334 and burned down repeatedly since, so the halls are modern. The pond garden behind them is not: it was laid out by the Zen master Musō Soseki and it borrows the mountain behind as part of the composition, which is a technique you will notice everywhere afterwards.

Ten minutes of path between walls of green stems twelve metres high, and the sound is as good as the sight. Enter from the walkway south of the railway rather than paying to cross the temple garden twice.

The mountain villa of Ōkōchi Denjirō, a silent film samurai star, who spent thirty years building it. A circuit of hill gardens with the city laid out below, and the entry fee includes tea and a sweet in the tea house at the end.

Soba and yudōfu, boiled tofu in a broth, are the local dishes, and the places along the main street do both well. Eat before two or you will find kitchens closing.

A three-storey pavilion covered in gold leaf, standing at the edge of its own reflection. Built as a shogun's retirement villa in the late fourteenth century, burned down in 1950 by a novice monk, and rebuilt five years later. Thirty minutes is enough, because you cannot go inside.

The most famous dry garden in Japan, and from any spot on the veranda you can only see fourteen of its fifteen rocks. Behind the hall there is a stone washbasin whose inscription reads, roughly, that to know sufficiency is to be rich. The temple also runs a good tofu restaurant in the grounds.

Bus 205 runs down from the Kinkaku-ji area to the station in about forty minutes, longer in traffic. Leave two hours before a shinkansen you care about.