We stayed the first couple of days of our trip in Kyoto and used that as a base of operations; there were a lot of places that were only a day trip away, one of which was Nara. Nara is a lot like Kyoto in that it contained many historic buildings, one of which is the largest wooden building in the world. That was all well and good, but we actually showed up too late to enter the temple!

The reason we were so late was because in Nara Park, there were a lot of deer roaming around, African Lion Safari style. But no, these weren’t the deer of Bambi, these were ferocious, predatory deer with an excellent sense of smell, and a particular taste for rice cookies that were sold for a few hundred ¥. I still get the giggles thinking about it, because the deer have a one-track-mind when it came to crackers. If they saw, or caught a whiff of them, the would plod around, slowly, trying to track you down. They would even let you pet them for a few seconds once they’ve been fed. Japanese people might get all obsessed with cats, but I was entirely fascinated with how deer were allowed to roam freely in the middle of the city!

Later on in our trip, we went to Miyajima which is near Hiroshima. There were more wild deer on this island, but they were much more competitive and clever than normal. We didn’t see any rice cookies for sale, so the deer had adapter to eating food that was wrapped. If they heard a rustle of wrappers or paper, they would make a (quicker!) beeline directly towards the source of the sound. This made it bad to buy souvenirs since they would eat all the souvenir bags!

They even put up a sign about this, but I don’t think reverse psychology works well on deer.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: animals, japan, travelling