Nara

- Nandaimon Gate & Great Buddha Hall (Daibutsuden)

Fushimi Inari Taisha

Woo hoo my photos came in the right way today!

Today we did a day trip to Nara from Kyoto. Nora is about an hour away by train. Nora is known for having deer that walk all over the city. It’s quite a cool place and I’d say this is one of our favourite days.

You got some classic convenience, food snacks to put in our bag as we weren’t sure if we would be near restaurants all day and we knew we might need to pick me up

First, we got to a little shout, covered shopping area called  Higashimuki Shopping Street

Of course we had to get a little snack. I like that the snacks came in, dear themed packaging.

These warm dangos were about $1.25 per stick and well worth it

Owen tried his luck at one of these capsule machines to get Pokémon cards

First top of the day was Kōfuku-ji Temple grounds. Wow!  Unexpected Nora to have teeny little shrines like we saw in Arishiyama yesterday. But the scale of these was huge

And we saw our first deer

A guy took this great family shot for us

Anna has gotten a stuffy souvenir on every trip and she knew she wanted to get one on this trip too so she decided that the deer would be a perfect stuffy

At that temple, we went into a national treasure hall, which had all kinds of amazing bronze statues unfortunately we weren’t able to take any pictures of them

From there, we walked into the deer park area. There are just a lot of deer walking around the entire town but many many many deer clustered in this deer park. You can buy food for them for ¥200 or just under two dollars throughout the day we spent about C$15 on deer food and had much much fun with The deer. From chat gpt: In the 8th century, when Kasuga Taisha shrine was established, a Shinto deity was believed to have arrived riding a white deer.

• Because of this, deer were considered sacred messengers of the gods
• Killing a deer was historically punishable by death during certain periods

This belief persisted for over 1,000 years, which is why the deer were never removed or hunted.

there are over 1000 deer in the Nara area. The deer bout you to get their treats apparently this is learning behaviour because so many people would bow at the deer when they fed them that the deer learned to bow and that when they did that people would give them treats so it’s just a learned behaviour

You did see some aggressive deer chasing people around it was mostly funny. We didn’t see anyone get hurt by an aggressive deer. You really needed to learn what to do you needed to hold out one small piece of cracker for the deer and keep all of the other crackers out of you as soon as you fed that deer the cracker you needed to hold up your hands to show them that you didn’t have any more food if you did that they would move along if not, they would start headbutting you to try to get more food.  We spent a lot of time in the park, feeding the deer and the kids loved it

Owen and a deer bowing to each other

From there, we found an awesome place for lunch one of the problems that we have in Japan is that each restaurant seems to focus on one specialty dish Trevor and I want to try all of the food but Owen and Anna are a bit pickier. This makes it a bit harder to find places to eat that we’re all satisfied with Today when we got hungry, Trevor looked up some places nearby and we found this place which was a restaurant/cafe. It oddly had both Japanese curry and several types of waffles trevor Joel and I got the curry which was absolutely fantastic. I’d say one of my favourite meals of the trip so far Owen and Anna got the waffles. It was a perfect lunch.

Many Japanese restaurants have these little things under the table for you to put your purse or backpack in so they don’t have to go on the floor

One was still a bit hungry after his waffle so he ate this salmon onshorethat he had got at 7-Eleven earlier today Owen loves these things and I swear if we let him he would eat them for every meal

While we sat there, there were some tables and there was a couple eating a sandwich at the table and a deer came up and tried to steal their sandwich and just would not let up and they kept moving and he kept following them and just incessantly trying to get their sandwich and they were laughing and trying to get away, but he would not leave them alone. Finally, Anna was able to lure him away with a deer cracker. this is the deer

From there, we walked over to Tōdai-ji Temple and the Great Buddha Hall. Again, this was huge and much bigger than I expected it to be The deer just wander around the grounds

All of the little Daycare kids in school kids wear these adorable little outfit. I tried to get some pictures from behind so I could post them

Inside this huge hall are several statues of different Buddhas and others. They were huge and very impressive

From there, we left the very busy touristy area and wandered up to a quieter spot called Nigatsu-dō

There were some nice views up here

Then we walked along a quiet path to get to the next place we were going. We knew we had to get to a fork in the road and then walk up for a bit so we got to a fork in the road and we started going up. We walked for about 10 minutes on a straight up path when we realize we were on the completely wrong path so we had to turn around and walk back down walk another hundred metres to get to the proper entrance and then start walking back up again. Our tired feet were not impressed

This is The wrong path

Travel looking dejected, getting to the bottom of the wrong path

This is the right path. Kasuga Taisha Shrine  It was a really cool place with many hanging lanterns and many mossy posts. A lot of  ambience.

There was one part where you went inside A hall and they had all the lights off so you could see the lanterns lit up

Again, dear all over

From there, it was about a 20 minute walk back to the train station with many many deer along the way

We have been wanting to get a parfait which are all over Japan, but it just hasn’t worked out to be timing when we’re hungry and we’re near a parfait shop today. We decided to seek one out. We looked one up on Google maps walk 10 minutes there and the guy said sorry that’s only me here and I’m too busy. I can’t serve five people and sent us on our way. so we disappointedly ate some 7-Eleven snacks while we waited for our train.  this was a super delicious egg yolk onigiri

From there, we took the train to Fushimi Inari Taiga. This is a temple that has hundreds and hundreds of red Tory gates that lead up a mountain. At this time we were losing daylight and we also had well over 20,000 steps. It was also about an hour on the train to get here and when you sit for an hour after a long day, you just end up exhausted so we were pretty tired, but we had enough energy to do it

The fox is the symbol of the shine

Looking back towards Kyoto, the sun was starting to set as we started our journey up. I asked ChatGPT how many stairs there are and they said somewhere between 500 and 700 stairs it’s not all stairs. Some of it is just slope so this was an estimate. It was so much climbing It was pretty fun though. It was very pretty. And I probably would’ve gone about 10% of the way and turned back if she had had the choice, but we made her push on Joel was bound and determined we were going to go to the top of the mountain which was way further than we actually went. We went to the first main viewpoint, which was about 30 minutes all uphill. Before before, turning back

When we got to the viewpoint, the sun was just setting and it was quite nice

I love this picture of Anna watching the sunset

The man, of course, the hike backed down The writing on these Tori Gates are all of the names of the people or company who donated them

By the time we got down to the bottom, it was pretty much dark

We were absolutely starving and with only a couple days left and having tried most of the food we are on trying some of our favorites. For the second time we decided to go back to ICHIRAN since we love the Ramen so much. This is us waiting for our table. They have an app that you scan and then it buzzes you when your table is ready.

Anna and Owen filling out their preference card

This was a funny set up in the bathroom

This is what it’s like inside you just get one little booth to yourself And again you’ve pre-ordered at the machine and filled out your card and the person from the kitchen just opens your little screen takes your card and two minutes later hand you back your Ramen this time Trevor and I ordered extra pork as well as an extra half order of noodles

So my original dish came with my Ramen, my egg that I had ordered plus my extra pork

Then once my noodles were almost gone, I put my little tray on the little spot which calls the waiter over to bring your extra noodles and he delivered my noodles through the screen

It was the perfect ending to a very busy day. We all loved our Ramen and it hit the spot.  Another crazy day of walking with 30,300 steps. I wish I knew how many stairs we walked up today. I bet it was 1000 steps. Easily Nora had so many steps and plus we walked up that huge hill accidentally  

We got back to our room. I took our laundry down to the shared laundry in the hostel so I’m just waiting for our dryer stuff to dry are hanging stuff I’m going to put in the sauna for a bit. wearing my free hotel Japanese slippers to do the laundry!

Tomorrow was supposed to be a day in a little village where we were going to do a long hike between the villages, but unfortunately around noon it’s supposed to start pouring rain and rain for the rest of the day. We’re also a little hike and temples out so we changed our plans and we booked the Kyoto team labs site since we all really enjoyed that in Tokyo the boys really want to check out the Pokémon centre in Kyoto as well so we’ll do a bit of shopping and Trev and Owen will check out a local climbing gym