Every guide tagged temples, for a trip to Japan.
Two religions, two sets of buildings and two sets of manners, visited by the same people on the same afternoon without anybody finding it strange.
The northern mountain villages, the temples nobody queues for and the neighbourhoods that still feel lived in, plus how to fit them around the famous sights rather than instead of them.
A couple of hours north of Tokyo: a UNESCO shrine complex carved with gilded ornament, a red sacred bridge, and a caldera lake with a waterfall above it, doable as one long day.
An hour from Tokyo, the medieval capital sits between wooded valleys and the sea, with temples in the hills, a small railway along the coast and surfers on the sand.
How to do Kyoto without the crowds swallowing you: the temples worth your time, the geisha district of Gion, a day-by-day plan, and the etiquette to get right.
Kyoto has around sixteen hundred temples and you will see six: which six, why the torii tunnel needs a dawn start, and how to avoid the two hour bus queue.
Japan's first permanent capital, forty minutes from Kyoto or Osaka, with a bronze Buddha in the largest wooden building of its kind and twelve hundred bowing deer.