In central Japan, about an hour's train ride from Osaka, there's a pretty little town called Nara. Nara is famous for one thing: deer! Lots and lots of deer! If you go to Nara Park you are guaranteed to come across these critters in abundance and let me tell you they're not as cute as they're cracked up to be!
We visited Nara on a dreary, bitterly cold Spring day. It was drizzling and windy and I didn't think kindly of the weather gods at all that day. I tell you, the breeze cut like a frozen blade and my eyes kept watering from the chill. Still, we made the trek from the train station to Nara Park and my mood soon turned into something brighter. It's difficult to be cranky when you're in the presence of some cheeky deer. I seriously chuckled all day at their antics. I learnt early on not to try and feed them - the number of people I saw offering food and then bitten or bucked or running and screaming in terror was plentiful. lol. If a Nara deer knows you have food they will hound you until it ends up in their mouths. True.
The park is beautiful and scenic and being surrounded by Buddhist temples and shrines we found it easy to fill a whole day. I have great memories of my partner, Ben, being attacked by a heard of pushy deer. It is also here that I saw one of the most beautiful scenes in all our travels around Japan - a heard of grazing deer treading on a carpet of fallen cherry blossoms with more petals raining on them from above. It was so very idyllic, the stuff fairytales are made of!
Enough rambling, here are the pictures...
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