Kyoto alone in April: a thousand gates at dawn, one maiko in Gion, and the market I missed by four days

I count things when I travel alone. It is not a nervous habit, or not only. It is how I remember. So: Kyoto, eight nights, one backpack, fourteen temples and shrines, two flea markets missed, one maiko, and more torii gates than I could keep track of, which I will come to.

The path

My hotel was a business hotel by Nijo Castle, a room with a bed, a desk, a kettle and a window, which is all I need, and a breakfast of rice, miso and pickles that I came to look forward to more than is reasonable. The first proper morning I took the bus across the city to Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion, which is not silver and is better for it: a wooden villa, a raked cone of sand, moss. From there the Philosopher's Path follows a canal for two kilometres south to Nanzen-ji, and in the second week of April the cherry trees on both banks are in full blossom and the petals are on the water, moving slowly, so the canal looks pink from the bridges. I walked it in an hour and a half and could have taken three. Nanzen-ji at the end has a brick aqueduct running through the temple grounds, Meiji-era, which should look wrong and does not.

Gion in the early evening is the time to see a geiko or a maiko on her way to an appointment, and it is a matter of luck and patience. I stood on Hanamikoji for forty minutes with a coffee from a vending machine. One maiko, at ten to six, in a green kimono with the long sleeves, hair pinned with flowers for April, walking fast on tall wooden clogs with a man carrying her bag. Eleven people photographed her. I did not. It felt like enough to have seen it. Kiyomizu-dera after that, the temple on its wooden stage above the city, the stage held up by pillars without a single nail, the whole hillside below it lit.

The tea, the gold, the gates

A tea ceremony in a small room near Kiyomizu, six of us on our knees, the host whisking the matcha into a green foam with a bamboo whisk and explaining that the bowl is turned twice before you drink so that the best side faces your host. The tea is bitter and the sweet before it is very sweet, and that is the point. Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, I did at opening time to beat the school groups, and I beat most of them: the pavilion covered in gold leaf, reflected in its pond, gaudy and perfect, and then a row of eleven-year-olds in yellow hats arriving behind me like weather. Ryoan-ji next door has the rock garden, fifteen stones in raked gravel, and from no single spot can you see all fifteen. I checked. It is true.

Fushimi Inari I did at dawn, as everyone says to, and everyone is right. The train from the station is five minutes and at six in the morning there were perhaps twenty of us. The torii gates start at the shrine and climb the mountain in tunnels, orange, each one donated by a business with its name painted on the back in black. I counted to three hundred and gave up somewhere on the first slope. There are said to be ten thousand. Halfway up there is a viewpoint over the city and a tea house that was not yet open, and the people coming down were all runners. By the time I was back at the bottom the tour buses had arrived and the tunnels were a queue.

Nijo Castle, which I had been walking past every morning, has nightingale floors: the corridors are built so that the boards sing when you step on them, a thin chirp, and it is impossible to cross one silently. I tried. The shogun's guards would have had me in seconds. Yasaka Shrine on the last evening with its lanterns lit, and Maruyama Park behind it, where the great weeping cherry stands by itself, lit from below, and the whole city seemed to be standing under it in a kind of quiet.

Two days out

Osaka is fifteen minutes by express train and feels like a different country. Dotonbori at night is a canal lined with neon, the running man sign, a giant mechanical crab, and food stalls every three metres: I ate takoyaki, octopus balls, too hot, standing up, and counted four separate queues for four separate kinds of fried thing. Nara is the other way, an hour south, and the deer are the story. More than a thousand of them loose in the park, and they bow for the crackers sold on every corner, a real bow, head down, and then they are at your pockets. Todai-ji behind the park holds the Great Buddha, fifteen metres of bronze in a wooden hall so large that the pillar at the back has a hole through it the size of one of his nostrils, and children crawl through for luck. I watched eleven go through. None got stuck.

What I missed

Nishiki Market is a covered arcade four hundred metres long, pickles and knives and candied baby octopus with a quail egg inside, which I ate because I was dared to by nobody but myself. The sake tour in Fushimi, the brewing district south of the city, ended with six tastings and the knowledge that I prefer the dry ones. But the two things I had wanted most I missed by the calendar: the Kobo-san flea market at To-ji is on the twenty-first of every month and the Tenjin-san market at Kitano Tenmangu on the twenty-fifth, and I flew out on the nineteenth. Four days. I walked round To-ji anyway, its five-storey pagoda the tallest wooden tower in Japan, and the empty courtyard where the stalls would be.

What I know now

Go to the gates at dawn and the gold at opening. Stand on Hanamikoji and wait. Check the dates of the markets before the dates of the flights. Learn to kneel. And count something, anything, because in a city with this many temples you will otherwise come home with one blur where fourteen different quiets should be.