Walking trails, forests and Japanese cities

Day 1 - Kyoto

One of our English-speaking guides meets you at Kansai Airport and takes you on to Kyoto — about 80 minutes by train.

Bags down, then as much or as little as the flight has left you. Most of the city centre is walkable, and the stalls along Nishiki market stay open into the evening. Tomorrow the walking starts properly.

Day 2 - Kyoto

Today you walk the eastern side of Kyoto with your English-speaking guide.

Start at Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion — a National Treasure that was never silvered, and whose dry garden, the karesansui, includes a cone of sand raked to a point. From there the Philosopher’s Path follows an old canal lined with cherry trees as far as Nanzen-ji.

Then the streets: Teramachi and its covered arcades, where the second-hand shops are worth an hour, or Nishiki market — five blocks of pickles, knives, tofu and grilled eel, narrow enough in places that you walk it single file.

Kansai cooking is lighter on soy than Tokyo’s and sweeter in its stocks. Worth noticing while you eat.

Day 3 - Kyoto

West of the city today.

Begin at Arashiyama: the bamboo grove, where the stems knock together in any wind, and Tenryu-ji, a UNESCO site whose garden was laid out in the fourteenth century and has kept its shape since. Then a walk along the Katsura river, quiet in every season.

In the afternoon, north to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, gold leaf on the two upper floors and doubled in the pond in front of it. The rock garden at Ryoan-ji is close by: fifteen stones, and no position from which all fifteen can be seen at once. If the crowds have been too much, Daitoku-ji and its sub-temple gardens stay largely empty.

Day 4 - Kyoto

1 hour by train from Kyoto station, Nara was the capital of Japan from 710 to 784 and kept a good deal of it.

The deer that meet you were long held to be messengers of the gods and are protected now; they bow for a biscuit, and will go through a paper bag to find one. The park holds the main sites — Kofuku-ji and its five-storey pagoda, and Todai-ji, the largest wooden building in the world, with a bronze Buddha 15 metres high inside it.

Afterwards, walk the old centre and its Edo-period wooden townhouses, narrow at the front and long behind, and work through the local specialities. Mount Wakakusa, 342 metres, is there for anyone who wants the climb and the view over the basin.

Day 5 - Kii-Tanabe

A last day around Kyoto — a temple you have not reached yet, or the hills at Ohara — before the train south in the late afternoon. Three hours down the Kii peninsula to Tanabe, where you rest before starting to walk tomorrow.

Day 6 - Takahara

An hour by bus brings you to Takijiri-oji, the gate where the pilgrimage proper begins. The Kumano Kodo has been walked for more than a thousand years, and is one of only two pilgrimage routes in the world on the UNESCO list.

Two to three hours of climbing through cedar and cypress bring you up to Takahara, a village on a shoulder of the ridge that holds the mist below it most mornings. You sleep in a minshuku, a family-run inn: tatami, futon, a traditional dinner of what the household cooked, and a hot bath afterwards. The walls are thin and the bathroom is shared.

• Distance: 4 km
• Time: 2 or 3 h
• Ascent: 430 m
• Descent: 200 m

Day 7 - Chikatsuyu

You leave Takahara on foot and climb back into the mountains along the pilgrim trail. The old road shows itself as you go — among other things an ichirizuka, one of the stone markers set at intervals to measure the distance walked.

The path then drops to the lunch stop, which serves what the valley grows. A short climb after that brings you to the Hashiori-toge pass, where an unusual statue at the top shows an emperor astride both a horse and a cow.

From there a paved way and a flight of steps take you down to Chikatsuyu, a small village on the river.

• Distance: 10 km
• Time: 5 or 6 hours
• Ascent: 400 m
• Descent: 450 m

Day 8 - Yunomine Onsen

After a bus transfer to Hoshimon-oji, an hour, you are back on the Kumano Kodo.

The path crosses hamlets and forest at a gentle grade, which leaves you the attention for it. You come out at Kumano Hongu Taisha, founded in the ninth century, entering under the tallest torii in the world: 33 metres.

From the shrine it is about another hour and a half on foot to Yunomine Onsen.

• Distance: 7 km
• Time: 2 or 3 hours
• Ascent: 50 m
• Descent: 300 m

Day 9 - Kii-Katsura

Another bus, this time to the town of Shingu, for Kumano Hayatama Taisha — one of the three grand shrines of the Kumano Kodo. The story told here is that three Shinto deities first came down to earth on this spot. The treasure hall holds more than 1000 sacred objects.

Then Nachi Taisha, where Shinto and Buddhist practice sit side by side, built for the Nachi waterfall, the highest single drop in Japan. The pagoda and the fall line up from one particular point on the path, which is why you have seen the photograph before.

Allow about 2 hours by bus and train to reach Kii-Katsura.

Day 10 - Nagoya

Your last hours in the fishing port of Kii-Katsuura, where, depending on the season, the morning tuna auction is open to watch — the fish come in on ice at the far end of the shed and the bidding is over quickly. Then 4 hours by train to Nagoya.

Day 11 - Tokyo

The Shinkansen this morning for Tokyo, 2h30.

You arrive with the evening ahead of you, which is a good argument for an izakaya.

Sliding door, a counter of worn cedar, plates arriving one at a time and the room getting louder as it fills. It is where the city eats after work.

Day 12 - Tokyo

Today is for the Shitamachi — literally the low city, the flat ground by the river where merchants and craftsmen lived, in plain contrast with the smarter districts along the Yamanote line, once the ground of nobles and lords.

You walk Ueno and Asakusa with your English-speaking guide, where contemporary shopfronts stand next to workshops that have not changed hands in four generations. It is the walk that explains why Tokyo reads as thirty small towns rather than one city.

Day 13 - Tokyo

Start early, while the commuter tide is still building. The hour between six and eight is the most honest look at how the capital runs.

Then walk from Harajuku, where the teenagers set the dress code, to the neon at Shinjuku. Two neighbourhoods twenty minutes apart with almost nothing in common, and a good deal of ground between them worth covering on foot.

Eat as you go — street stalls, a standing noodle counter, a department-store basement. The food is part of the route rather than an interruption of it.

The route is built around the contrast. A glass tower on one corner, and thirty metres behind it a lane too narrow for a car, with potted plants outside every door and somebody sweeping the step.

Day 14 - Tokyo

An hour from Tokyo on the JR line, with the Pacific appearing on the right for the last stretch.

Kamakura was the seat of government from 1185 to 1333, and the temples stayed. Many are dedicated to Kannon, which makes the town a close look at how Japanese Buddhism is practised rather than only how it is built.

The town also eats what lands in front of it: shirasu, whitebait, served raw over rice in season or grilled the rest of the year, straight off the boats at Koshigoe.

Through the day, take the time to stand in front of the Great Buddha at Kotoku-in — 11 metres of bronze, cast in 1252, in the open air since a tsunami took the hall around it in 1498 — then Hase-dera and its hillside, and the beaches on the Pacific side at the end of the afternoon.

Day 15 - Departure

A last morning in Tokyo for whatever is left: a neighbourhood you have not reached, a few things to take home, one more meal eaten standing up. Your legs carry the walking of the past week and your eyes carry the rest of it. You leave lighter than you arrived, heading back towards the setting sun.