Ryoan-ji

The garden is a walled rectangle of about 25 by 10 metres, raked white gravel with fifteen rocks in five groups, sitting in moss. It is kare-sansui, dry landscape: no water, no plants inside the frame, nothing that changes with the season except the light and the wall.

What is not known: who designed it, when it was made — estimates run from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century — and what, if anything, it depicts. The familiar readings are tiger cubs crossing a river, islands in a sea, the Chinese character for heart. All are later attributions. The temple's own English material is careful about this, and the most repeated fact about the place — that from any position on the veranda one rock is always hidden — is a real property of the layout that no source can show was intended.

The wall matters as much as the rocks. It was built with clay boiled in oil, and centuries of seepage have stained it in tones that shift as the sun moves. It also slopes: the far edge is lower, which lengthens the garden to the eye.

How long to give it

Twenty minutes on the veranda is enough to see it. An hour is where people either understand what the garden is doing or conclude it is not for them, and both are legitimate outcomes. The veranda is deep and there is room to sit at the back, out of the flow of the group tours that arrive from about 10:00.

If you have exactly one contemplative hour to spend in Kyoto, the argument for spending it here rather than at Kinkaku-ji is that the gold pavilion has nothing more to give after the first look and this does.

The tsukubai and the pond

Behind the hojo stands a stone water basin with four characters arranged around its square opening, which shares its stroke to make them read ware tada taru wo shiru — "I know only that I have enough". It is a copy; the original is kept out of the weather.

Below the buildings lies Kyoyochi, a pond garden from the twelfth century, older than the temple and considerably older than the rocks. It has water lilies, mandarin ducks, a small island shrine and almost no visitors, because everybody walks straight up the path to the famous garden and straight back down again.

Ryoan-ji opens at 08:00 from March to November, half an hour to an hour before its neighbours, which makes it the natural first stop of a north-west morning even though most itineraries put the Golden Pavilion first.

Ryoan-ji to Ninna-ji is a twenty-minute walk down the Kinukake-no-michi rather than a bus ride, and Ninna-ji's Omuro cherries are the last in the city to bloom, usually a full week after everything else has finished — which is the reason to know about it in April.

City bus 59 runs from the centre to the Ryoanji-mae stop outside the gate; from Kyoto Station take bus 205 to Kinkakuji-michi and change to the 59, or ride the whole way on the 50 and walk. The other route is the Randen tram to Ryoanji station, about seven minutes' walk away, which is the pleasant option if you are coming from Arashiyama rather than the centre.

A flat city bus ride is $1.44 (¥230), so a north-west morning that includes two or three hops is the classic case for the $6.88 (¥1,100) day pass — the transport page does the arithmetic.

Ryoan-ji is the earliest opening in the north-west and the only sight in the quarter that rewards a slow visit, so it belongs at 08:00 with Kinkaku-ji after it rather than the other way round. The whole cluster — this, the Golden Pavilion and Ninna-ji — is a half day that ends by one o'clock, which leaves the afternoon for the centre or for Arashiyama on the tram.

The three-day itinerary gives the north-west that half day; the two-day one makes you choose between this and the bamboo.