Nara Deer Park

So following my last post about my experiences in Kyoto, I thought I would continue with my story of what happened for the rest of the day. After being exhausted after walking around the Nison-in Temple and Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, we began to look for ideas of things to do on our way back to Kyoto station.

Nara park was on our list of potenital days anyway, but we were not sure if we would have enough time to do everything we wanted to! Luckily we had plenty of time left in the day, so we looked up directions and made our way to catch the Kintetsu express train to Nara.

Nara park is only a short walk (about 5 minutes) from the Kintetsu Nara Station and you can definitely tell you are in the right place by the amount of deer roaming about!! We found it a little difficult finding the place where you buy the food for the deer, but there are stalls all around the park selling the food and we found some eventually! We enjoyed walking around between feeding deer and it was a really nice way to spend the day.

The deers in the paved side of the park seemed a lot calmer and cleaner than the other side with more grass. It was a lot of fun to feed the deer and we even got to take some pictures with the deer sitting on the rocks without them seeming bothered by us! On the other side, the deer were younger and a little more impatient. They were more likely to bite your clothes and continued to follow you even when you ran out of food, until they found someone else to feed them.

Info:

• Deer food costs 150 yen for a pack of about 10 crackers
• Closest to Kintetsu Nara Station (about 5 minutes)
• There are deers all around and the park is huge so it doesn't matter where in the area you go as long as you have the food!