Hello everyone! I am trying to plan out the Kyoto portion of my trip in late Nov/early Dec of this year. It will be my first time in Kyoto. My home base will be in Osaka so I’ll be day tripping it out to Kyoto for these days. I’ve been doing some reading based off other folks itineraries and am having a tough time visualizing if my days are too packed, or if I can add more activities. My gut feeling says these days might be too packed and if so, where would the cutoff be? I’m also open to any recommendations outside of what I have already listed (if something is worth replacing/removing/adding, any meal suggestions around my itinerary, etc). anything goes! Without further ado…
**Day 1**
* Kiyomizu-dera temple (going very early)
* SNOOPY Chocolat
* Sannenzaka
* Ninenzaka
* Ryozen Kannon
* Kōdai-ji Temple
* Maruyama Park
* Yasaka Shrine
* Fushimi Inari
* Kawaramachi / Kiyamachi-dori areas (if time permits)
* Gion’s preserved streets (if time permits)
* Teramachi-dori (if time permits)
**Day 2**
* Monkey Park
* Arashiyama (bamboo forest)
* Tenryu-ji
* taxi to Kinkaku-ji (golden temple)
* taxi to Saihō-ji (Koke-dera) Temple
* Philosopher’s Path (if time permits)
* Nishiki Market (Kawaramachi station)
* Pokemon Center Kyoto
* Walk down Kamo River
**Day 3 (morning only)**
* Morning: open for anything that doesn’t fit in the above 2 days that might be worth checking out
* Noon/Afternoon: Nara day trip
edit: formatting
edit2: added Tenryu-ji
edit3: added Pokemon Center Kyoto
2 comments
Definitely way too packed. You could be speed blitzing and sprinting throughout and still struggle to complete this itinerary.
For Day 1 your day would probably end by the time you hit Fushimi Inari. You could go at night instead but you would definitely not have time for your 3 optional activities. The best time imo to go to Teramachi is in the afternoon when everything would be open. You could easily spend a couple of hours there.
Day 2 is slightly more doable if you rush through, but most people easily spend half a day at arashiyama. There’s also not much of a difference between the pokemon centers so you don’t have to purposely stop by the one in Kyoto as there’s one in Osaka as well.
Your itinerary seems a little all over the place as things close together are not grouped together. Eg. Nishiki market and Teramachi are next to each other so it would be easier to do those 2 together. You should pin your destinations on google maps and have a look from there
Also this looks like A LOT of walking, so make sure you are physically and mentally able to take this on
The monkey park doesn’t open until 9am, so you should do the bamboo forest first. Even then, it’s hard to imagine cramming in so much stuff each day. Keep in mind that even for stuff like Teramachi, shops start closing as early as 5:30pm. Kyoto goes to bed early.
I’d recommend moving Fushimi Inari to the morning of your third day. You want to get up really early to do Fushimi Inari.
Also, I would personally recommend skipping Nishiki Market. I walked down there on accident and discovered that it’s a complete tourist trap, in a physical sense as well. The street is narrow and extremely crowded. I’d recommend sticking to the wider streets like Teramachi. Speaking of which, Nishiki literally branches off of Teramachi, so it makes utterly no sense to do them on two separate days.
For comparison, here’s what I did in three days in Kyoto. Note that on Days 1 and 3, I woke up around 6am to get an early start.
* Day 1: Fushimi Inari, Fujinomori Shrine, Otani Hombyo (accidentally mistook this for Kiyomizudera and went to the wrong place), go back to hotel early to nap and do laundry
* Day 2: Arashiyama bamboo grove, Arashiyama park and gorge observation, Arashiyama Monkey Park, Toei Eigamura, Kyoto Station (view sunset from roof)
* Day 3: Kiyomizudera (for real this time), Ninenzaka Starbucks, Yasaka Shrine, Maruyama Park, Chion-in Temple, Nijo Castle, explore the covered shopping streets by my hostel (Shinkyogoku, Teramachi, Nishiki).