We've finally made it to my last Japan recap! On our last full day we spent the morning with some adorable bowing deer in Nara and visiting Todai-ji Temple. If this were the beginning of the trip we would have made more of an effort to visit other areas of Nara, but as we were on day 13 (our last full day) we didn't have it in us to walk too much.

Posts for each city:

Day 13 (Friday)

Where We Went

Tōdai-ji Temple

Todaiji Temple is famous for its 15m high Buddha and other larger than life statues. We arrived at Kintetsu-Nara Station right about 9am and took a slow walk to the entrance of Nara Park and continued past the first stream of bowing deer to get to Todai-ji temple. We got to the Nandaimon Gate (The Great South Gate) at just about 9:30am and crowds were already pretty large. There were still lots of deer on the path to the temple but at one point there are stairs and gates to block the deer from entering the sacred space.'

It costs ¥800 to enter Daibutsu-den/Great Buddha Hall and it is well worth it to gaze upon the enormous statue. The building is the largest wooden structure in the world. The Vairocana Buddha, which is almost 50 feet tall (1498cm,) was made in the 8th century and is one of the national treasures of Japan.

Left: Bronze Octagonal Lantern (8th Century) | Right: Wooden Binzuru (healer) sculpture

Kokuzo Bosatsu (God of Space Element)

Koumokutan (God of the West) and Tenmontan (God of the North)

Model of Todai-ji Temple

Nara Park

Most people come to Nara just to feed the deer, and that was a big draw for us as well. We paid ¥200 for a pack of shika senbei to feed the deer.

After we had our fill of feeding deer we went into a couple gift shops and got some more souvenirs for family. We picked up some treats for my Dad (Deer shaped cookies with chocolate filling) and Christian's Mom's husband (Honey Buns) and grabbed a bunch of different fabric handkerchiefs for my mom to use for a quilting project.

Our train back wasn't leaving until 11:50 and we were done with the deer and shopping around 11 so we decided to sit in an open area where people were feeding deer to people watch for 20 or so minutes. Deer kept coming up to sniff our bag and make sure we didn't have crackers for them. We got back to the train station at 11:30 and waited for our very special train to arrive!

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Aoniyoshi sightseeing limited express

Not technically a place, but we're going with it, ha ha. For our trip back to Kyoto from Nara we booked ourselves on the Aoniyoshi sightseeing limited express. It goes from Kyoto to Osaka but we only went half the route. It is a small low-capacity train that makes you feel like you’re in an old movie. They even had purple themed snacks and souvenirs available to match the train! We spent ¥1200 ($7.72) on our two snacks, which is pricey compared to other food we had on the trip, but we were splurging for the fun of it.

Our train was pretty empty, which was a nice change from the crowded normal trains! We bought our tickets ahead of time and changed to a different time on the day thanks to their easy to use website! (We decided we could head back to Kyoto sooner and switched to the earlier train.) You’ll need the limited express train ticket plus normal train fare. We just tapped our Suica cards when entering and exiting sections for the normal fare. It was only ¥1460/$9.38 for our special tickets and ¥760 for the normal fare.

The train left Nara at 11:50 and we arrived back in Kyoto at 12:25, a nice relaxing journey!