Nara Travel Guide

Nara (奈良市) is an ancient capital city in Nara Prefecture, Kansai region of Japan. Overshadowed by its more famous neighbor Kyoto, Nara is omitted from many a time-pressed tourist's itinerary. However, Nara is home to many important scenic and historical sites, and today preserves its main sights much more attractively than Kyoto within Nara Park and neighborhoods like Naramachi. In addition to lovely foliage and many old buildings, Nara Park is famous for deer—hundreds of them that have become very comfortable around people and can be fed and petted.

Nara does not have its own airport; most visitors arrive via eitherKansai International Airport(KIXIATA) orOsaka's Itami Airport (ITMIATA), for domestic flights.

Once within Nara Park, you can walk to almost all the other major sites. The conventional round course (from Kintetsu Nara Station to Kōfuku-ji, Nara National Museum, Tōdai-ji, Kasuga Taisha and back to Kintetsu Nara Station) is about 6 km long, a pleasant walk for the typical tourist.

The deer in Nara Park tend to be friendly and perhaps overly eager to eatshika-senbeibiscuits from the hands of tourists - simply possessing some will inevitably attract a small crowd of five or six deer, whose extreme and single-minded interest in these biscuits and accompanying lack of respect for your personal space may well be a bit startling when experienced en masse. Don't be fooled by the publicity shots of the deer being happily petted: they can sometimes be aggressive in pursuit of thos

As usual throughout Japan, make your reservation as early as possible for August (the time of yearly vacations and Bon festivals, when it is customary for the Japanese to travel to their and their ancestors' birthplaces) and around Christmas and New Year, and also in early November, when Shosoin treasures are on display at the National Museum. Cheaper accommodation may sell out or raise prices.