Day 23, in which we pass through 10,000 gates and meet 1,001 ladies each with 1,000 arms

After breakfast at a charming Starbucks overlooking the river, we visited the Fushimi Shrine to the east of Kyoto, a sort of Shinto version of Times Square where local and national companies erect giant red gates bearing their names, although the aim is to gain favour from the gods rather than raising brand awareness. The Fushimi Shrine is devoted to Inari - the god of rice - so it's hard to imagine why electronics manufacturers and fund managers are falling over themselves to pay tribute to him, but as it happens there are over ten thousand of these red gates snaking up the mountain through the forest, sometimes so densely packed you cannot see through to the trees outside.

A happy morning was spent exploring the different gated pathways leading up the mountainside, which branch off to visit different shrines and religious sites, most of which are guarded by Inari's messengers (who are all foxes, of course, usually wearing dashing red capes). There were spectacular views of Kyoto from the top of the mountain, and the city was revealed to carpet the entire plain, stretching off to the mountains to the far west in unbroken urban development. We got lost in our descent and ended up wandering through a bamboo plantation into an affluent part of Kyoto suburbia.

After a quick coffee, we trusted the guidebook rather too much by believing its reports of a "near hallucinatory effect" to be had at Sanjusangen-do Temple. Sanjusangen holds first prize in that most hotly-contested of competitions, "the longest wooden structure in the world", and also houses the largest number of statues of Kannon (the goddess of Mercy), a thousand of them all guarding one giant version of the same goddess. Why a goddess should be recruited multiple times to guard herself was not clear, but the effect was far from hallucinatory. Mundane in their uniformity might be a better way of putting it: once you've seen 200 near-identical statues of Kannon, you've pretty much seen them all. To complicate matters, Kannon has a thousand arms and so the sculptors had to produce over a million arms in total. If I were embarking on this exercise I would probably have had Kannon guarded by a thousand slugs - much easier, and you could do it with play-dough.

The south-east of Kyoto is home to a large number of temples and shrines, but after our Sanjusangen experience we decided to skip most of them, gorge ourselves on rice products and head straight for the Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which involves the usual giant red gates, pagodas, camp statues of thunder gods and cruelly contorted cedar trees, but is also halfway up the mountain and has great views of the city. Dusk was approaching by now, the sun resting just above the mountains in the distance, and it was well worth the climb uphill for the view alone.

Trotting home, we passed through the Gion District, which is the oldest and most traditional part of Kyoto, lying east of the river and thus untouched by the fires which typically destroyed the rest of the city at least every 200 years (there isn't a tourist attraction in the guidebook which wasn't at least partially rebuilt within the past century thanks to fire). The houses in Gion were typically Japanese constructions - all elegant bamboo supports, wooden frames and sliding paper doorways - but the Japanese are also typically very private people, and so we got to see little more than the streetside facade. When delicate geisha women slipped through their sliding doorways, the process was an elegant sleight-of-hand designed to prevent any prying eyes from seeing inside.

This is all far more culture than I would typically seek out when visiting a European city (I haven't been to a single museum, church or art gallery in Florence, for example), so to relax and recover we returned to the Happy Island for a bottle of wine and dinner. When we had lunch here yesterday it was 3pm and the place was deserted, but the decor and staff were so lovely we decided it would be good to see it in the evening, bustling with customers and full of atmosphere. Well, we sat there all night drinking wine and eating dinner and the only other customers to enter the building were two grumpy old men who each smoked a cigarette before leaving again. I suspect we might be in Kyoto out of season.

We had an excellent aubergine lasagne - which is an interesting take on Asian fusion - before returning to the room to watch Sir Matt Damon's super new film, the Bourne Ultimatum.