Back in the fall of 2008, I took a multi-day trip to explore Japan for the first time… this is about the second part of the trip to visit Kyoto and Nara, the first part of the trip was to Osaka and Hiroshima. This is also the second entry in the Year of the Monkey series of my blog. This day trip took place the day after Halloween, which was a rest day on this trip back in Kawasaki. On November 1st, I woke up early and took the shinkansen.
On my first visit to Kyoto, I had two places I wanted to visit: Arashiyama and Fushimi Inari shrine. Arashiyama was my first stop in the morning, it was a beautiful forested mountain and river scenery area, but the reason I wanted to visit Arashiyama was due to the Monkey Park there, where I could see my first wild monkeys. I came to Kyoto with a friend of mine who more or less followed me because he didn’t know what else to do. The park was nice, there was a small hike after the entrance booth up to a nice observation area. The monkeys were free roaming and mostly they didn’t let people get close to them, however there was a hut on the hill where you could go inside and feed the monkeys pieces of apples and other things through the bars, this was the only area that people are allowed to feed the monkeys from, so that the monkeys wouldn’t steal food or attack people outside of the hut. It was a fantastic experience and my first experience interacting with monkeys.
After a few hours at the Arashiyama Monkey Park, we left and we went to Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, which is a famous shrine due to its 10,000 or so red-orange torii (Japanese arches) lined up in a row to pass through. This was a really beautiful area and of course I felt like I needed to walk through all of them which would have been fine, but that also meant walking through all of them with my friend, whom was incredibly slow, we made it through after a few hours, but between being slow here and barely missing our train and taking longer than planned time at the monkey park we chopped a few hours off of our original planned destination for the end of the day: Nara.
There were plenty of beautiful places to see in Nara, one of Japan’s older capital cities, but the reason I went on this day was to see Japan’s other famous deer hang out (having visited Miyajima a few days earlier). Plus, having arrived near dusk, we wouldn’t have been able to see most of the places anyway. Mostly what I did was I went to the central park area between all of the temples and bought some “deer cakes” and fed a bunch of deer and I was pretty popular among the deer. After that, we ended up grabbing a burger at MOS Burger before catching the shinkansen back home to Kawasaki.
Length of trip: 1 day (Sat, Nov. 1, 2008).
New cities visited: Kyoto, Nara.
New prefectures visited: Kyoto, Nara.