Japan: Part 5. Nara.

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...

Japan: Part 4. Nagasaki.

After Kyoto we headed to Hiroshima where we spent time in the Peace Park and wandering the streets of what is an incredibly hip and cool Japanese city. We had a lovely time there and saw some of the best cherry blossom action of our entire trip. The park surrounding Hiroshima Castle was incredibly beautiful with all its trees in full bloom. Unfortunately I was sick of carrying my 'good' camera around and I didn't take it out in Hiroshima, so I have no images from there. But I made up for that when we visited Nagasaki!

Nagasaki is in the south of Japan, on the island of Kyushu. It's a harbour town, a major Japanese port, and as such its architecture and culture has been heavily influenced by traders from around the globe such as Portugal, Spain, China, the Netherlands and Britain. For this reason many of the sights in Nagasaki have their roots somewhere else.

We stayed right next to one of Nagasaki's major attractions - Glover Garden, originally created to surround the home of a Scottish Merchant who played a central role in modernising the Japanese shipping and mining industries. The gardens overlook Nagasaki harbour and combine both Japanese and English gardens which were flowering with gusto while were there.

We also visited the Confucious Shrine, built for the local Chinese community. This temple, with its rows of imposing confucian statues and elaborate central shrine is actually Chinese territory. We spent ages wandering around the grounds soaking up the serenity of the space. It was one of those things that we stumbled across, which turned out to be an absolute gem to visit.

For the rest of our time in Nagasaki (we had three days) it mostly rained so we just took to walking the streets when we could and exploring, soaking up the local ambience and enjoying being somewhere quiet (compared to other Japanese cities we'd visited). I took lots of snapshots along the way...