We’re booked on the 7.20am Shinkansen from Kyoto to Hiroshima for our second attempt to view the bomb site. This morning, we made it. We slept on the way there then when we arrived stopped in at Starbucks again for a coffee & a salad wrap then onto find the shuttle bus so we can’t start our hop on hop off visits of the multiple affected sites during the war.

I thought it would be like a big museum we could walk through looking at different bits & pieces & to hear stories & recounts of what happened on that fateful day so many years ago but it was very different. There were about 10 stops to choose from and you were able to get on & off the bus at each one as you please. Of all the sites, there was only about 4 that was of interest to us - the Japanese gardens, Hiroshima castle, the bomb drop dome & the peace memorial museum.

First stop was the Japanese gardens and they were beautiful. So peaceful & lovely colours, ponds with cod fish all through them & pretty bridges we could walk across. Next stop, Hiroshima castle. It was pretty but more a site of the building of the castle & the history surrounding the families that built it than the actual bombing itself (which is what I was interested in) Then, onto the bomb dome. It was nice to see, our first real viewing of the effect of the bomb drop. It’s a big dome that shows you the exact point the bomb dropped through the building killing around 200,000 people. Devastating. Our final stop was to the peace memorial museum, unfortunately it was closed for “Earthquake protection reconstruction” which was disappointing but I guess that’s important! Ha

Time to head back to the station and now onto Nara. I’ve read about this famous deer park over there, apparently there are literally tons of deers just roaming the park freely that you can pat & feed and boy I’m excited for that!!

It was another long trek out to the deer park, the only thing about having my own license back home & being a very keen driver is that I can most times get from point A to B fairly quickly. This trip has been good but it’s our first holiday we’ve been on where we haven’t hired a car, thankfully all the trains run extremely on time or our travel times would be even longer - Yes, I’m looking at you Newcastle rail line!!

None the less, out to Nara park we go. Upon arriving we were amazed to see the deer literally just walking the streets, not even secured off into a park just free to roam with the people and traffic. So weird.
Not long after arriving, we found this cute little deer right in front of us & he was super friendly....until he ripped the map right out of my hands and starting eating it! I tried very hard to get it back out of his mouth, I think he won that battle as I could only grab half the map back...oops.

We then grabbed some food from the street cart to feed the deer & it didn’t take long for them to start running over to us for a feed...about as quickly as it took for me to have one of them bite me on the bum, and be nudged on all sides of my body by the others. Apparently I wasn’t quick enough to feed all of them at once!

Some of them were super aggressive too, I had a few of them ramming each other to get to the food first right in front of me, Mum got nudged either side by two at once and Pete, well Pete got in the middle (by accident) of two ramming each other and he copped a ram straight in the gut...it was actually pretty hilarious but seriously, these guys are crazy!

After realizing I don’t actually like deer that much, not these ones anyway...only reindeer we decided to head on over to the temples behind the deer park. Right before we went to walk off two deer had been fighting (again) and chased each other straight out onto the road & continued to bolt up the street, around the park and back into the middle of the grounds again with a little red car locking their brakes up only narrowly missing one of them...it was HECTIC!

The temples around the park were lovely, we grabbed some happy snaps of them and then headed for the train back to our hotel. Tonight is our last night here in Kyoto & tomorrow is another big day with us heading over to Osaka early in the morning then spending the day at Universal studios and I most definitely can not wait for that!