I literally just left Kyoto yesterday and while this is certainly not my first autumn festival period in the city, these are the worst crowds I've ever encountered over the years, including pre-virus. While we were able to find a few quiet spots here and there, like Kodai-Ji during the day, the first night we drove in from Osaka and went directly to Kiyomizu-dera and was blown away by the crowds. Luckily we aborted driving up the access road given the temple lot was closed to cars, so we parked offsite and walked up - took some absolutely stunning photos, but had to climb over about 500 people to do it. What was more remarkable was the construction of such an ancient temple could hold the weight of that many people. They need to add one more Buddha - one with a big eye roll given the 10,000 to 1 ratio of people there to take selfies vs a moment of prayer and respect.

Next day took us to relatively quiet Nara (quiet in comparison), and the following day, Aramshiyama was worse than Walmart on Black Friday morning - parking was a no-go, but we found a temple way up from the river on the main tourist street we never visited before - and they had an open lot for just Y800 for the day. We made sure to spend extra time there, and it was a beautiful small temple with nice grounds. Walking around a couple temples and a portion of the bamboo forest was doable for a few spots to get photos. We also did the river walk on the far side, which was quiet in comparison.

Now we're in Tokyo which doesn't have the crushing number of tourists, or we're just lucky avoiding them - we went to Showa Park, tomorrow will be a few other quieter spots as I think we're burned out from the crowds.