Where peacocks eat out of your hand – City of 10,000 Buddhas

During our recent visit to the US, we had a chance to visit the “City of Ten Thousand Buddhas” near Ukiah, California. We had seen Romil Komal take whoever visited Santa Rosa there and the resulting beautiful pictures with the peacocks. Since we all 4 are peacock fans, this became a must visit place for us especially we saw in those pictures that the peacocks were eating out of people’s hands.

Earlier in 2013, we had been to Kutch where we saw many peacocks but they all used to fly away when we came very close to them. So we were looking forward to this trip where we could be closer to the peacocks. And we were not disappointed.

Ukiah is about 60 miles north of Santa Rosa. We had take some bird grains with us. Our encounter with the peacocks started right from the parking lot. We took some bird grains in our hand and some peacocks who were loitering around in the parking lot came closer to eat them right from the hand. After feeding the peacocks for some time, we went to the actual Buddhist temple. There are 10,000 buddhas (big and small) here. It is a very serene place.

The third attraction was the very good vegetarian restaurant that they have on site. Very nice menu and food was good too.

You can combine this trip with a trip to Santa Rosa. Overall this place is worth visiting for the peacock experience , the serene environment and the tasty food. Given a chance we would definitely go back.