Heading south from Kyoto, we arrived in Nara to a cold and very rainy day but we still decided to head out and look around Nara-koen (koen = park) and visit Todai-ji and the Daibutsu-den (Buddha hall). Many hundreds of umbrellas actually made it very colourful in the end! Lots of school groups were also out for the afternoon and eager to stop foreign tourists (like us) to ask us questions in english. We were also given many little origami shapes as gifts. There are tame deer wandering around Nara-koen that are rather eager for food - you can buy special deer biscuits at some stalls to feed them, but be warned! As soon as you buy them the deer are ready for them and think nothing of butting you :) The park staff round them up every year to saw back their antlers so they don't hurt people. We saw one young one with antlers - they are two very sharp prongs!
Dave and a Shika (deer)
Todai-ji is very impressive. The Daibutsu-den is the largest wooden building in the world and it's not even the original, which was nearly twice as big! As the name suggests, it was built to house an enourmous statue of Buddha (amongst 3 other statues). This Buddha, unlike the Daibutsu in Kamakura has had a rough time and lost it's head quite a few times. The latest head still dates back a couple of hundred years. Most of the Japanese temples and buildingss etc we have visited are not not originals but their replacements still date back a lot further than anything in NZ's history!
Todai-ji's Daibutsu-den
After Nara, we headed south again up into the Kii Mountains. It was an impressive train ride through some very beautiful orchard growing regions and forested mountain valleys. The final leg up to the mountain-top World Heritage buddist complex of Koya-san is up a ropeway. Koya-san is very pretty nestled in amongst very tall pines with quaint traditional buildings and temples. There are currently about 4000 inhabitants and over one hundred temples for the monks but this is just a fraction of what used to be here. We spent the evening wandering through the massive Oku-no-in cemetary, ending in the sacred Torodo building with hundreds of lanterns, including 2 that have remained lit for over 200 years. Through the back of the building you can see the roof of the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi (also Kukai), the buddist monk who set up this complex and many others around Japan. He was an amazing person - has been compared to Leonardo Da Vinci in the many talents and great work he did.
Oku-no-in
Statues of Jizo
Jizo
Buddist graves and monuments
Our stay in Koya-san was with some monks living in the temple of Shojoshin-in. This was really fantastic as the temple was beautiful, the monks were so friendly and the food was amazing (traditional vegetarian shojin-ryori). We really enjoyed this and was well worth it! We also got up early for the morning prayer ceremony which was a great experience. The monks have beautiful voices.
Shosjoshin-in
The garden at Shojoshin-in
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