About Nara to Kyoto

September 27

On Sunday morning, our host Ikuko treated us to a delicious breakfast. After that, we strolled through the tea fields once more and stocked up on enormous quantities of the regional green tea before continuing our journey.

Then we drove to the former capital Nara, which was the seat of government in Japan before Kyoto and Tokyo in the 8th century.

Here, there are numerous important Buddhist temples, shrines, museums, a vast park, and – as the main attraction – hundreds of free-roaming, semi-tame Sika deer.

This is a real highlight in Japan and especially very, very well visited on Sundays. But of course, we wanted to see the deer as well.

You can wander through the beautiful park areas, which, to be honest, smelled considerably stronger than all the other parks we had visited so far. No wonder, with several hundred deer roaming free.

For the animals, you can buy small packages of special cookies. Bringing your own food is, of course, forbidden.

However, the deer now know exactly how things work:

The deer and tourists greet each other politely. First, the deer bows, then the tourist. Afterwards, the cookie is handed over. Everyone is happy.

At least, that’s how it should go.

However, sometimes you are also besieged by a horde of hungry deer that skip the polite formalities and emphasize their request for cookies with varying degrees of gentle headbutts.

We, of course, bought a package to get our personal deer picture. And indeed, it worked fairly well.

We also visited the Tōdai-ji Temple complex, where a giant bronze Buddha sits in its enormous wooden hall. That was indeed quite impressive.

After that, we visited a museum that displayed further temple treasures. But then our visit to Nara was already over.

So we drove the last stretch with the rental car to Kyoto, right into the center to the station. After returning the rental car, I was honestly quite glad not to have to drive on the streets of this city anymore.

In the metropolitan area of Kyoto–Osaka–Kobe, around 19 million people live together, and the traffic was definitely not as relaxed as in the rural regions we had visited so far.

Afterwards, we checked into our very reasonably priced hotel located directly at the station and only explored the immediate surroundings a bit in the evening.

As a culinary exploration, we went to McDonald’s to try out the Japanese offerings. The burger with soy sauce was actually not bad at all.

After that, the day was already over.