Search for a Kyoto itinerary and you’ll find two- and three-day versions without trying. The more honest ones stretch to five and add a day trip to Nara. I’m not sure five is enough. I’m fairly sure four, with Nara, isn’t.

You can do it, of course. Photograph the gate, tick off the temple, catch the next train. But if you want to sit for a while, notice the small things, and wait while someone calligraphs your goshuin by hand, three days becomes almost absurd.

I know this because I tried. When I plan a trip, I build the wishlist first and pare it down afterwards, and for Kyoto I managed only the first half. Four days. A day trip to Nara. A temple or shrine for nearly every hour. I was being overenthusiastic, and it took a typhoon to tell me so. Much like the rest of my trip.

What follows is what the four days actually held. It is much shorter than the list, and I wouldn’t trade it.

Day 1: The Eastern Slopes

I set out to conquer the list, and I lasted until Shōrenin Temple, my very first stop. There is a writing desk there, set beside the garden, and I stood looking at it far longer than I’d planned to. You can see exactly how an idea might arrive in a room like that.

Chionin came next, with its steps. So many that somewhere in the climb I stopped counting and started questioning the wisdom of putting this many temples into a single day.

At every temple there was a queue for the goshuin. Each one is calligraphed by hand, and it cannot be hurried. After the first few, I stopped wanting to hurry it. The waiting had become part of the visit. At Yasaka Shrine I took part in a ritual I hadn’t slotted in anywhere. In Maruyama Park, I ate ice cream and watched tourists in rented kimono photograph each other, and nobody, including me, was in any rush at all.

Kōdaiji Temple had a single line on my spreadsheet. There is a room there that looks out over the garden, and I sat in it while time seemed to stand still. Afterwards I found its bamboo grove, smaller and far quieter than the famous one at Arashiyama, and I understood that I had been bracing to fight crowds for something I could have had here first, in peace.

Then Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka, and a sea of umbrellas I joined. Everyone watched their feet. Slip on those slopes, the story goes, and the bad luck follows you home. Nobody wanted to be the one.

I had not conquered the list. Somewhere between the desk and the umbrellas, I’d stopped checking it.

Day 2: The Typhoon

The typhoon had other plans for my well-structured itinerary, so the morning went.

The afternoon was Nishiki Market and a warm cup of matcha, held in both hands while the rain kept coming. I stayed until it thinned.

Late that evening I walked through Gion, and it was nearly empty. These are the same streets you normally share with a hundred people holding phones. It was the version of Gion I would never have planned, and I would have missed it entirely if the day had gone to schedule.

Day 3: Arashiyama, at a leisurely pace

I began at Otagi Nenbutsuji. Hundreds of stone figures, every one different. There is a grumpy one under a cap of moss, scowling at whoever walks past, and a bearded one grinning as if he knows exactly what you’re about to say. Another holds a cat up in both arms. Inside the wide open mouth of a fourth, someone had left a miniature robot. It was as though each volunteer had listened to the stone and carved what it asked for.

I work with old stone for a living, and I rarely get to meet stone that was shaped this freely. I crouched beside a row of them, pressed my hands to my cheeks, and tried to match their expressions. I think I held my own.

Then Adashino Nenbutsuji, with its eight thousand or so stone figures. In August they are lit for the spirits of the dead, and I stood among them trying to picture it.

The streets around it were preserved and quiet, with barely any tourists. I lost my sweater somewhere along them, and I still can’t bring myself to mind.

Lunch at Shigetsu, a Buddhist meal in the grounds of Tenryu-ji, was the kind of treat that makes your morning feel earned. (The full story is in my where-to-eat-in-Kyoto post.) After it, came Tenryu-ji itself, and by the time I reached the Bamboo Forest the crowds had thinned enough that it no longer looked like something to be endured for a photograph.

I ended the day at Kinkakuji, as the sun went down and all that gold settled into the water.

Day 4: The Two I Couldn’t Skip

All that walking meant a later start. But leaving Kyoto without Fushimi Inari and Kiyomizu-dera would have been criminal, so we went to both.

At Fushimi Inari I kept climbing past the first few gates, the ones in every photograph. Beyond them the crowds thin and the smaller sub-shrines begin, flanked by fox statues, the kitsune. There are thousands of vermilion gates, each donated by a business, each one a prayer for success. You walk under a very large number of other people’s hopes.

At Kiyomizu-dera I queued to drink from the Otowa waterfall, three streams that are each said to bring something different: success, love, long life. The line was full of students, hoping for success.

Then everyone gathered for the sunset. The Sai-mon, the west gate, is one of the best places in Kyoto to watch it, and there is a Buddhist practice for exactly this, nissokan: contemplating the setting sun as a way of envisioning the Pure Land. People stood at the gate and looked west, and for a few minutes nobody asked anything of the evening.

What’s Left

I did not see everything I set out to see. A finished list would have given me no reason to go back.

Nara.

Ginkakuji.

The Philosopher’s Path.

Kameyama Park.

Togetsukyo Bridge.

Daitoku-ji.

Ryoanji.

Nanzenji.