Afternoon in Nara Park

By early afternoon the sun and the tour groups had both come out. There were long, straggling lines of school children, dressed in matching blue blazers and regulation haircuts. At the front of each line was a guide in a beanie hat, shouting inanities through a megaphone. I escaped up the stone steps of a temple. From the top you could see the whole of Nara, squashed between the mountains like an arm in a vice.