Day 24, in which we are hurried through our spiritual contemplation

We had brunch in the Nishijin weaving district in the north of Kyoto, at a traditional Japanese bathhouse which has been converted into the fabulous café-restaurant Sarasa Nishijin. The café retains the wooden structure and all of the original tile work, and has added some very friendly waiters, great music and a lovely sausage salad and chicken broth meal deal.

We were up in Nishijin to visit the Daitoku-ji complex of temples, which are famous for their 'dry landscape' zen gardens. There are four separate temples to visit, but we showed great restraint in only visiting two before deciding we were sufficiently enlightened. The guidebook reports that zen gardens are aids to meditation and that one could spend entire days in contemplation of a single garden. This was particularly impossible at the Daisen-in temple, where an elderly curator pulled us round the various gardens, only leaving us alone for five minutes before sticking his head back round the corner to see what was taking us so long. “We is reaching a new spiritual plane, innit?” I wanted to shout at him.

Each zen garden was a different arrangement of raked gravel, stones and moss. They would make cute features in a courtyard or quiet corner of the garden, but I didn't buy into their spiritual significance. The interpretations attributed to them were spectacularly unimaginative: raked gravel was usually a river, any flat round stone was a turtle swimming in the river (a symbol of despair, of course) and any longer shaped rocks were usually a boat, typically symbolising a journey down the river (and therefore life). Any remaining rocks that didn't fit into this complex philosophy were interpreted as simply mountains, or were given names the same way one spots cloud formations in the sky: this rock looks a bit like a man humping a cantaloupe, or a beetle carrying a hairdryer, or is it a particularly long wasp?

At the most famous zen garden in the world (in Daisen-in) we thus found the river of life carrying a boat laden with a turtle (despair) and a stork (joy), and near to the mouth of the river (i.e. the point of death) was a sleeping cow (apparently this was to illustrate that even cows must struggle against the inevitability of their death, although as it was sleeping it doesn't seem Daisy was in this case struggling particularly hard). We also saw one of the smallest zen gardens in the world, at Ryogen-in, which had three rocks in a thin strip of gravel, two of them representing binary opposites (male/female, life/death, Mel/Kim) and the third rock completely ignored by this interpretation.

We skipped out of Daitoku-ji and high-tailed it on the tube down to Nijo-jo, a palace built as the Kyoto residence of the Shogun in 1603 in a direct challenge to the authority of the Emperor, but now housing Japan's largest collection of 'No Photograph' signs, as well as a selection of new 'No Sketching' signs not currently viewable anywhere else in the country. We were reaching cultural overload by this point - having seen endless temples and shrines and pagodas and gardens over the past ten days - and things were not helped by the tour information provided at Nijo-jo, which focussed on the 'National Treasures' we were seeing (elegant painted paper screens, wooden carvings, silk tapestries), but mentioned nothing about the purpose or historical significance of the building we were standing in. I came out knowing that Someone Very Important had once painted a tiger on a piece of silk many years ago, but not which room it was in or what political decisions it might have overseen. We also learned nothing about the structure of the building, which was arranged as a row of squares connected only by their north-west and south-east corners, with wide corridors flanking the external walls and the rooms protected by a wall of sliding doors on the inside. It was an odd way to built a palace, but they didn't think to say why.

The gardens were lovely, however, and are structured within two concentric moats, which I suppose the Shogun demanded as it leads to plenty of photo opportunities in front of pretty bridges. It also was here that we decided to go drink wine at the Ace Café at the top of Pontocho Alley. Pontocho is built on a land reclaimed from the river, and has a more friendly, individual Soho feel compared to the rest of Kyoto. The Ace Café is on the tenth floor and looks across the river to the eastern mountains, which glowed red as the sun set behind us and made a great complement to the white wine and Japanese indie music.

We had dinner at Bio-tei off Sanjo Dori, an organic vegan-friendly café in what feels like someone's kitchen. The vegan meal deal – tofu steak with tomato sauce – sounded pretty bland, so we decided to be vegan-unfriendly and had a selection of mackerel and salmon salads, tofu-dressed-vegetables and deep-fried tofu soup. Everything was delicious and the meal contained more salad and vegetables than we've eaten during the rest of our visit to Japan.

We strolled home happy, and watched Zooey Deschanel's new movie, Yes Man, featuring Jim Carrey. It was far, far better than I'd expected, and Mr Carrey only did his silly faces twice.