Koyasan to Nara

This morning was a jam-packed schedule all before 9am with a relatively early wakeup to go watch the early morning Buddhist ceremony where three monks did a series of gonging, chanting sutras, cymbals, and bells. It lasted about 25 minutes and was very mesmerising, almost trance like to listen to. No photos allowed of this one. The monks wore slightly more ornate robes for this ceremony than there plain cotton daily wear we were greeted in the day before.

Breakfast was another traditional meal in the main dining hall, with a quick chance in between to clean the teeth before the goma/homa (fire) ceremony commenced at 8am. This ceremony is unique to Esoteric Buddhism, performed for the purpose of destroying negative energies and thoughts. The night before we were invited to write your name, age and a wish/prayer on a flat decorated stick which is then burnt and offered to the deities. It was such a special event to witness.

It was a chilly 1°C when we left the monastery, so with no coffee shops open we raided a vending machine for a hot chocolate. The drink was very well positioned to heat our hands up perfectly, too bad it didn't really taste great.

Despite only having to travel about 70km if we were driving today, the public transport options saw us walk, catch a bus to the funicular, catch the funicular down the mountain, and then catch three other trains to get to Nara. Apart from one tricky thing where we circumnavigated a building because we took the wrong exit, we made it relatively easily into Nara. We are staying at a guest house here for two nights, and it wasn't manned when we arrived, but they kindly gave us the pin code to get in and drop our luggage off so we were unencumbered for the rest of the afternoon.

First order was lunch because we were getting a little peckish, and that saw us in a second floor restaurant we found in an arcade which was Chinese! Probably one of the most excellent sweet and sour porks I have ever eaten.

We then followed the crowd to the east end of town and spent the next few hours walking through the Kasugayama Primeval Forest which contains many many temples which are all world heritage sites. This is also home to the famous wild deer which roam around harassing people for food. They have learnt to bow their head as you pass by and I strangely felt compelled to bow back to these deer. It was an odd feeling. I read a blog on the train from someone who declared them all assholes because he kept getting bitten by them. Given just as we walked into the park we saw one tourist yelling and swearing because he had been harassed by a rather persistent deer, and then later and old man who had evidently fallen off his bike because of the deer and was lying on the path with his face covered in blood, I would agree with this assessment. We stopped for a matcha ice-cream (we are still attempting to like this awful matcha stuff), and kept getting butted gently by a couple of them. One the matcha front, we both agree matcha ice-cream is the best use of matcha so far.

On the way back to the guesthouse, we took a convoluted route to a place which sells second hand yukata and haori. It was a jam packed tiny store with an ET wearing a kimino on the top shelf (funny). After rummaging through the stock, we picked up a yukata each at a great price, so we can now bring a little bit of Japan home with us.

Our room is semi Japanese with tatami mats, and good grief, we don't have someone to make up our futons tonight 🙂. Our heads are supposed to point away from the North (because we are not dead) but we have been guided by the location of powerpoints rather than cultural taboo. The "semi" is that we are sitting on poang chairs from IKEA to write this. They are a welcome clash of culture in my humble opinion, as my hips are ready to pop out of their sockets with the amount of cross legged floor sitting we have done in the last 24 hours of Buddhism.

Dinner tonight was a strange clash of rice, omelette, bechamel sauce and prawns, which was then grilled. Kinda like a Japanese mac and cheese. We have agreed on a lazy start to the day tomorrow, although having said that, Lynette's idea of what constitutes sleeping in and my idea are probably on different planets.Read more