Kyoto in 2 Days

The only major sight in Japan that opens at 06:00. An hour here at half past six buys the stage without a crowd and the Otowa waterfall without a queue.

Leave by the Koyasu pagoda path for the view back at the stage, which almost nobody walks.

Preserved stone lanes with the shutters down. The same streets at eleven o'clock are a shuffling queue, which is the entire argument for the early start.

Ishibei-koji, off Nene-no-Michi, takes four minutes and is usually empty.

Kodai-ji's gardens and bamboo grove are the quiet counterpart to the temple above, and the shrine at the bottom of the hill is open at every hour.

Breakfast around here, or hold out for the market.

1,001 gilded Kannon in a 120-metre hall. Shoes off, no photographs, one direction, forty minutes — the most predictable stop in Kyoto.

The Kyoto National Museum is directly opposite if the weather has turned.

Lunch. Pickles, yuba, tamagoyaki, a skewer — eaten at the shop rather than on the move, which is the market's own request.

The depachika halls under the Shijo department stores are the air-conditioned alternative.

Shirakawa's canal lane first, then Hanamikoji. The private lanes are posted closed by the residents' council; the public streets are the ones to walk.

Kennin-ji at the bottom of the street is Kyoto's oldest Zen temple and almost empty at this hour.

Keihan from Gion-Shijo, about seven minutes. The crowd thins from five, and fifteen minutes up the mountain there is nobody at all.

Yotsutsuji is forty minutes up and the only real view; the shrine has no closing time, so the light decides your turnaround.

JR Sagano line from Kyoto Station, fifteen minutes, then thirteen on foot. At half past seven the path is what the photographs claim; at ten it is a single-file queue.

Walk to the north end and Okochi Sanso, then double back.

Opens at 08:30, exactly when the grove starts filling. The pond garden has kept the form its designer gave it in the 1340s, with the hills borrowed as a back wall.

Enter from the north gate side and leave by the front — or the reverse, if you want to end back in the bamboo.

The bridge, the riverbank and — if you have the appetite for a twenty-minute climb — the macaques on Iwatayama, whose own website has been offline since at least 30 August 2026, so we quote no price for it.

Coffee on the north bank, then back to the station.

Either eat in Arashiyama — the tofu and yuba restaurants near the bridge are genuinely good — or take the JR back and eat downtown.

Then bus 11 or the train and a change for the north-west. This is the transfer the day pass exists for.

The Golden Pavilion is a fixed one-way circuit of about twenty-five minutes; you never go inside, and the reflection is best in flat light.

Afternoon is not its best hour — that is 09:00 — but on a two-day plan the morning belongs to the bamboo.

Fifteen rocks in raked gravel that nobody can date or explain. Twenty minutes to look, an hour to sit — and the veranda has room at the back once the tour groups pass through.

The Kyoyochi pond below the temple is older than the rock garden and almost always empty.

The castle stops selling tickets at 16:00, so this only works if you cut the north-west short — which is a legitimate choice on a wet day, because Ninomaru is the one properly indoor hour available.

Otherwise, bus back downtown and eat in Pontocho, or take the subway from Kitaoji.