I ended up holding reservations for the Monterey for about $220 per night. Its cherry blossom week and was getting nervous that many hotels are already booked, so i held this one as a back up. Anyone stay at the Monterey recently? Its only 2 yrs old..seems clean.

We stayed, very recently, in the Monterey, and had a good experience. Will be posting a full review of the hotel in due course. If you have any queries now including about how to get to the hotel from the station with luggage, either ask here or PM me for more.

As to getting about, you will find you will probably use subway, bus and trains. We already had a JR pass. We also made good use of the 2 day combined bus and subway pass (for Y2000) as this enables you to get to almost every area, temple and shrine. The pass comes with an excellent map that enables you to work out the best route for major destinations, depending on where you are starting from. We also zipped about, swapping from bus to bus, and subway to bus, saving our feet for walking in the more interesting areas.

SWT

tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g298564-d634599…

Don't be afraid to take the buses in Kyoto. Just pick up a English bus route map at the bus information centre just outside the north central exit of Kyoto station and you can pretty much plan your sightseeing around that and the subways. The buses are pretty good at having the bus stop names announced in English. Yes they can be crowded at times but being 'budget' travellers we just hopped on at the station with our two large suitcases and 2 kids and managed quite well.

Its a flat fee of Y220 pretty much anywhere within the city.

As regards a one or two day pass, it pretty much depends on how much travelling you want to do in a day. When I was there I only caught a couple of buses a day so it was more economical to not buy a pass, but just pay as you go.

The taxis are fine also, but with the bus and subway you can get everywhere you want to go.