Ninna-ji and the Kinukake-no-michi
The great Omuro temple, its low late cherries and five-storey pagoda, then the road past Ryoan-ji. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Ninna-ji Nio-mon gate
Start at the huge wooden gate of *Ninna-ji*, founded in 888 as an imperial temple — abbots were princes for a thousand years. The gate alone, with its guardian figures, sets the scale of the place.

2. The Omuro cherries and the pagoda
A grove of *Omuro-zakura*, famously low and late — they bloom in mid-April when the rest of Kyoto is finished, at eye level rather than overhead. The five-storey pagoda rises behind them. Worth timing the whole walk around if April allows.

3. The Goten (abbot's residence garden)
A separate ticket buys the palace rooms and their *teien* (garden) — raked gravel, a pond, and the pagoda borrowed into the view from a wooden veranda you can sit on. The quietest corner of a big temple.

4. Kinukake-no-michi (the temple road)
East from Ninna-ji runs the 'road of draped silk', named for an emperor who had a summer hill hung with white cloth to feign snow. A leafy, gently rising lane linking the three great temples; walk it, don't bus it.

5. Ryoan-ji
The most famous dry garden in Japan — fifteen stones in raked gravel, and nobody agrees what it means. Come early or accept the crowd; the mossed pond garden below it is the part most people skip and shouldn't.

6. Toward Kinkaku-ji
The road carries on east toward the Golden Pavilion. You can finish the silk road at the *Kinkaku-ji* gate and the bus stop just outside it — or turn back at Ryoan-ji if the temples are starting to blur. Either is a fair ending.

Ninna-ji and the Kinukake-no-michi