A Day in Nara

This morning we packed up our belongings and left our friendly Kyoto apartment to travel to Nara. It is only a short, 1 hour, train ride to Nara, and could easily have been done in a day trip, but it's a nice and liveable city, and makes nice change from busy Kyoto. The tourist region in Nara is basically a huge park, dotted with old temple and monuments, which gradually makes way into beautiful forest. Oh, and there are some deer, but more on them later. Nara was actually the capital of Japan before it shifted to Kyoto in 794 AD. It's also a sister city to Canberra, although nobody seems to know about that here!

After arriving, we dropped our bags off at our hotel and headed into the park. First, we sat down for a snack, wondering whether we would see any deer - but they obviously heard us rustling our portable sushi wrappers, because first one and then more deer rushed up to meet us. The point is that you can buy deer crackers (150 yen per packet) and feed them. Very cute, and they are mostly tame ... except for the bunch of 10 or so that mobbed Nat. And the one that tried to pick a fight with Ella by jumping on her. And the one that snuck up behind Katy when she had hidden the crackers behind her back, and chomped one of her fingers! That one actually drew blood, and lead to outbursts of "I hate deer," which lasted for all of 5 minutes, before both girls were back feeding crackers again.

Our route took us through the park, past some ponds and up to Kasuga Taisha Shine. From here, I persuaded the girls we should climb up Wakakusayama Hill, which took us up through the forests to the East of Nara to a lookout. The forest was amazing, they had awesome rest areas and it was a nice view, but I hadn't realised it was a 3km climb to the top. However, a can of hot corn soup from the vending machine* on top, and quickly chomping down our leftover sushi (before the deer stole it from us) and we all found the energy to descend.

Back in the park, our walk culminated in the Daibutsuden in Todaiji Temple, which is a huge wooden building with a gigantic Buddha in. And the girls had to crawl through a hole in a pillar to bring themselves enlightenment (I'm not sure it has worked yet).

The tourist areas of Nara are pretty crowded, but once you get away from the main attractions it is very nice. And at the end of the day, the tourists leave Nara on buses and we are left with a nice relaxed town. In the evening we strolled through the covered malls to find a nice little restaurant, in which the chef and his wife gave us special treatment - we had to write in their guest book, and they concluded by giving us a calligraphy sheet with our names written in Japanese.

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* For those who haven't been to Japan before, vending machines are everywhere here. You can buy almost every type of drink you like, including a huge array of soft drinks, coffee (hot or cold; the hot stuff is awful and I haven't braved the cold version) and even hot corn soup. Some special machines even have ice cream, but it's been a bit cold to attempt that one.