One of the reasons we picked Kyoto as our base for this trip was it’s central location to other side trip-worthy places. Yesterday we went to Nara – an easy 35 minute train trip away.
In Nara, most of the major sites have been enclosed in a huge park. So unlike Kyoto where the temples and shrines are kind of crowded in with modern residential and commercial buildings, the attractions in Nara have more space to breathe. Good thing, too, because the Japanese tourists were out in force again. The open spaces made it much less claustrophobic that Kyoto.
The weather was beautiful – about 55 degrees and sunny. Nara is famous for its “wild” deer, which roam around the park. They are actually ridiculously tame after a lifetime of getting fed “deer cookies” by tourists. Some of them are pretty presumptuous, actually coming up to sort of beg for food. They are pretty much everywhere in the park, but the government does a great job of cleaning up after them. The only place that smelled like deer was right outside the central food court area, where the population was more concentrated than the rest of the park.
We were pretty much templed-out, so we decided not to go in to most of the sites. The one thing we came to see was Japan’s biggest Buddha statue. It was totally worth the trip.
