Nara
Nara Day Tour
22.02.2010 - 23.02.2010
16 °C
View
Round the world
on travelwjim's travel map.
I am now in Kyoto after travelling here on the very impressive, very fast but also very expensive Shinkansen Train (bullet train) from Tokyo Station. With speeds of up to 186mph it was a brilliant experience and as something that Japan is famous for, it was well worth the money. Today I visited Nara which is Japans oldest capital city about 60km's from Kyoto, it was a very interesting place with original buildings and statues dating back to the 8th century. It was the capital of Japan from 710 to 784 before Kyoto became the capital. Amazingly in Nara there was an abundance of tame deer roaming the streets eating out of peoples hands and posing for photographs. We visited the Todaji Temple which is home to the largest buddha statue in Japan, a stunning statue with a backdrop of over 440 kg's of gold (which, i'm told, is unfortunately too heavy to send to cash4gold). The buddha is housed in the worlds largest wooden building which was another incredible piece of japanese architecure and almost as impressive as the Buddha itself. The second place I visited in Nara is a shinto shrine that is home to over 1000 thousand stone lanterns, some of which are 1300 years old set in protected woodland with deer roaming around freely. It was an incredible place, I'm very happy I didn't spend all my time in Japan in Tokyo as visiting Nara allowed me to see so much more of Japan, also having a japanese tour guide was very insightful. Tomorrow I am going on a tour of Kyoto
Posted by travelwjim 23.02.2010 19:30 Archived in Japan Tagged round_the_world
