Tea & Temples off the Tourist Path

Kyoto has 1,600 temples and tourists visit the same six. Ayaka’s route strings together the ones her grandmother took her to: a moss garden tended by one elderly monk, a mountain-edge hall where the only sound is water, a lane of unpainted wood the buses can’t reach.

The morning ends in a machiya tea room, where Ayaka — trained in the Urasenke school for eleven years — leads a full tea ceremony and, unusually, explains it as she goes. Questions are welcome. Silence, when it comes, is earned rather than imposed.