Day Three

Our goal for the third day was to head down to Nara (奈良市), primarily for the deer park. On our way back we would then visit Fushimi Inari Taisha. Our first stop that morning was to a coffee shop called sentido where we had breakfast and coffee. We wanted to make sure we were fueled up for the trip down to Nara, so we stopped in a grocery store 八百一本館 and picked up some snacks and browsed all the various foods. We ended up buying some fried chicken, onigiri, some sort of bread chips that were coated in toffee and the biggest cream bun doused in chocolate we could find.

At this point in our trip we were super familiar with Kyoto station and how we needed to find out where we should go. We almost got on a slower train when we noticed there was a rapid train and we promptly got on it just before it left. We arrived at Nara station at around 1pm.

We beelined straight for Nara Park (奈良公園) and there were tons of deer and Kofukuji Temple (興福寺). There are vendor carts that allow you to buy crackers to feed the deer. And yes, they will bow at you to get crackers from you. The park was much larger than we thought and we ended up walking far away from the main park where there were even more deer.

Back outside the park, we walked along the street we came up from to look at all the shops. We ended up catching the local safety parade.

We then stumbled on Wata Wata Fukurou (ふくろうカフェ わたわた), an Owl Cafe. We paid around 1000 yen for a drink ticket and about an hour of time with the owls. We could pet owls that were on their perch and we were allowed to choose one owl to hold.

We finally made our made our way back to Nara Station and got on the local Nara Line train to take us to Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine (伏見稲荷大社). We arrived arrived at Inari Station a little after 6pm and were greeted by an absolutely insane amount of tourists. Since we were losing the light we raced as deep as we could into the shrine to get some pictures. The shrine is technically open 24/7, so once the sun set we then started the long like up to the summit of Mt. Inari (稲荷山) and then back down the other side. We hiked for over 90 minutes through all of the torii gates and it was worth every step.

When we arrived out the other side of the mountain, we headed back to the train station as it was already late and headed back to Kyoto. We headed back to Pontocho to find some dinner and found a sushi restaurant, though it was not particularly good sushi.