3 Days in Kyoto, Built Around the One Thing That Matters: the Clock

Nearest station: Bus to Gojozaka, then a 10-minute uphill walk

The temple opens at 6 am, hours before the tour buses, and this is the single best crowd arbitrage in Kyoto. The great wooden stage hangs over the hillside with the city below, and at this hour you share it with joggers and monks. Admission is 500 yen. Walk up the Gojozaka slope rather than the Matsubara-dori shopping lane, which is dead this early anyway.

The catch: The 6 am start is the whole trick. Arrive at 10 and this stop takes twice as long and gives half as much.

The two preserved stone lanes below the temple are the Kyoto of every photograph: wooden machiya houses, tiled roofs, a pagoda rising behind. They cost nothing and they are at their best right now, as the shops open and before the day-trippers land. Yasaka Pagoda at the bottom is the classic shot.

The catch: By 10:30 these lanes are the most crowded 400 metres in Japan. You will be gone by then.

Kodai-ji is the quiet counterweight to Kiyomizu-dera: raked gravel, a bamboo stand, lacquered halls and a fraction of the visitors. Maruyama Park below it is where the city itself relaxes, and in cherry-blossom week its weeping cherry is the most famous tree in Kyoto.

The catch: It is an extra entry fee on a day that could be nearly free. Skip it if the budget is the constraint; keep it if you want one temple in peace.

Eat in the lanes around Yasaka Shrine rather than on the tourist drags: the side streets hold udon and obanzai places at half the price. Then walk down to the Kamo River, where the whole city sits on the banks when the weather is kind.

The geisha district works in the evening, when the day visitors have gone and the lanterns come on. Walk Hanamikoji-dori south of Shijo, then the Shirakawa canal lane, which is the prettiest street in the city. Photography is restricted on some private lanes and the rule is enforced; the streetscape, not a chased photograph, is the point.

The catch: You may see no geiko at all. Treat any sighting as luck, not the goal, and the evening cannot disappoint you.

Nearest station: JR Saga-Arashiyama, 15 min from Kyoto Station

The famous path through the bamboo is short, free and always open, which is exactly why the only way to have it is at dawn. Fifteen minutes on the JR Sagano line from Kyoto Station and a ten-minute walk puts you inside it while the light is still coming through in shafts. Walk it twice; it is over too quickly the first time.

The catch: It is smaller than the photographs imply. The point is the light and the quiet, and both are gone by mid-morning.

The great Zen temple beside the grove opens at 8:30, and its Sogenchi garden, borrowing the Arashiyama hills as its backdrop, has looked like this for seven centuries. The garden ticket is 500 yen, with the buildings an optional 300 more; the garden is the reason you are here.

The catch: The garden-plus-buildings upsell is skippable. The view you came for is from the garden path, not the tatami.

Walk out of the temple's south gate to the river, where the wooden-decked Togetsukyo bridge crosses beneath the wooded hillside. Boats, herons and, in autumn, the best free foliage view in the city. Coffee and street food line the approach.

Nearest station: Bus 204/205 to Kinkakuji-michi

The Golden Pavilion is exactly what it promises: a three-storey pavilion sheathed in gold leaf above a mirror pond. It is a 500 yen ticket and a one-way circuit that takes under an hour. Early afternoon is its quietest realistic window, after the morning tour groups and before the schools. Cross the city by bus or taxi from Arashiyama; allow 40 minutes.

The catch: You view it across the pond and cannot enter it. It is a twenty-minute sight inside an hour-long circuit, and it is still worth it.

Five covered blocks of food stalls in the centre: tofu doughnuts, grilled eel, pickles, knives. Most stalls wind down from 5 pm, so come for the tail of the day, graze, and let it hand you into the restaurant lanes of Pontocho for dinner along the river.

The catch: It is famous and it knows it: some stalls are tourist-priced. Eat where the queue is Japanese.

Nearest station: JR Inari, 5 min from Kyoto Station

Thousands of vermilion torii gates tunnel up the mountainside, and the shrine charges nothing and never shuts. From the JR Nara line it is two stops and five minutes from Kyoto Station to Inari, and at six you will walk long stretches of the gates alone. Climb at least to the Yotsutsuji viewpoint, about 45 minutes up, where the city opens below; the full circuit takes two to three hours.

The catch: The lower gates are a scrum by mid-morning. If you cannot do the dawn start, do the climb in the evening instead; the upper mountain is quiet at both ends of the day.

Nearest station: Bus 5 or 17 to Ginkakuji-michi

The Silver Pavilion never got its silver, and is the better for it: a restrained villa above a garden of raked sand cones and moss, the aesthetic opposite of the morning's crowds. 500 yen, and the hillside path through the garden gives one of the best small views in the city. Cross town by Keihan line and bus; allow an hour with a coffee.

The canal-side walking path runs two kilometres south from Ginkaku-ji under a tunnel of cherry trees, past small temples and smaller cafes. In blossom week it is one of the most famous walks on earth; the rest of the year it is simply the calmest hour in Kyoto. Lunch at one of the cafes along the canal.

The path delivers you to Nanzen-ji's massive Sanmon gate and the unexpected brick aqueduct behind it, a Meiji-era waterway that curves through the temple grounds. The grounds are free to wander; the gate climb and sub-temples charge small fees you can skip without loss.

The catch: Temple fatigue is real by day three. If you are done, be done: the grounds and the aqueduct give the best of it in twenty minutes.

End where the city ends its own days: the narrow lantern-lit alley of Pontocho, one restaurant wide and five hundred metres long, with the river terraces behind it in the warm months. Book nothing, walk it once end to end, and eat where it smells best.