Click here to see all of the photos I took on this day.
Our trip to Mt. Fuji and the Hakone region had required very little walking, so we decided we were well enough rested to try catching a train to Nikko.
Nikko is a small mountain village about two hours North of Tokyo by train. The town is famous for its many shrines and important artworks concentrated into a small area, including the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first Shogun of Japan. The entire area has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
From my research I had learned that there were several ways to get there, but the best was to take the Tobu Line from the Tobu-Asakusa station. We took the subway until we reached Asakusa, where we had to head out onto the street and walk about a block to the Tobu station beneath a department store.
Once there, we really weren't sure what to do, so I asked a gray-haired station employee for advice. His English was limited, but he asked if we intended to take the regular train or the limited train. I shrugged to indicate that I wasn't sure what that even meant. He helped us buy two tickets at about 1350 Yen each. He headed off to other duties, and after standing around for a minute or two we decided we needed to head up a nearby escalator where we found the train platform.
There were two young women working there, so I asked if this was the train to Nikko. They said it was the Limited Express, and informed me that our tickets were for the regular train. The Limited Express cost extra and was leaving at 9:30am. If we took the regular train we'd have to wait another 40 minutes. It was already 9:27am, so we quickly gave the necessary money to one of the women who then used it at a kiosk to purchase our upgrades. We got our tickets and hopped on board just in time.
The train was very nice, with foreward facing, reclining seats and fold out foot rests (for use only with your shoes removed). No one was on the car we boarded, so we picked a couple of seats near the front and got settled in just before the train left the station. We later learned that this train was much faster and more comfortable than any of the other options for getting to Nikko, and only two of them leave Tokyo daily at 7:30 and 9:30 AM.
As we rode along relaxing, the conductor came through the car and asked to see our tickets. He explained to us (in limited English) that all of the seats on the train were assigned, and we weren't sitting in ours. He didn't ask us to move, but instead scanned our tickets and changed our seating arrangements in a handheld computer.
Erin settled in for a nap, and I watched the scenery go by out the window. Leaving the city, we passed through a lot of open countryside that looked much like scenes from My Neighbor Totoro. I saw farmers harvesting rice, and many trees full of ripe, orange Japanese persimmons. I saw a group of school children and their teacher, who were following their teacher's lead and waving wildly at the train as we sped by.
Occasionally a girl would push a cart of snacks and drinks through the car, and a voice would come over the radio announcing "tasty ice cream" and other treats available for sale. We stopped two or three times and picked up more passengers, but our car stayed empty. Eventually, we arrived at the Tobu-Nikko station, which was actually the end of the line.
Google Earth didn't have a good satellite photo of Nikko, but I had an idea of the orientation of the station and thought I knew which way was North, but it was overcast. I decided that the shrines were a short walk to the West, and we headed out.
This was a mistake. We kinda got lost.
It didn't take us long to realize we weren't sure where we were going. After wandering around small town neighborhoods for about half an hour (this was the one time on the trip when I sort of lost my temper with Erin, who wasn't acting concerned and kept wanting to stop and shop or look at interesting things we came across...her outlook was too positive for me at the moment), we finally doubled back to the station and asked for directions. As it turns out, we were heading in the right direction, but the shrines were much farther away than I had anticipated and were up a steady slope. We bought two bus tickets, shopped in a Hello Kitty store (where Erin had wanted to shop earlier when I was irritated) and then waited at the bus station.
As we sat, a Japanese girl came by and handed me a piece of paper with her handwriting on it. It said something about how she wanted to request some songs for a radio station, but didn't know much good music and wanted us to recommend something. We didn't really know what to say, so Erin wrote a Kelly Clarkson song on her list and the girl gave us a Japanese stamp and a piece of candy.
The bus to the shrines had buttons in it that you were supposed to push when they approached the stop you wanted, but nearly all of us piled off at Stop 3, right at the base of the Toshogu Shrine complex.
The shrine area of Nikko is surrounded by a dense, ancient forest. A temporary wooden pass was being built up the main road through the tori gates in preparation for a semi-annual festival when the portable shrines housed here would be paraded through the streets. There was water running down small trenches on the side of the street. After paying the small admission fee, we headed up a flight of stairs into the main shrine grounds.
At the top of the hill were really too many structures, temples, and artwork to describe in detail, many over 1200 years old. Among the highlights were the original carving of the "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" monkeys and a famous carving of a sleeping cat.
We paid a few Yen more to head up to the actual tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa. As we wound up a path through beautiful forest, we climbed over 200 stairs, stopping to rest at landings along the way. Near the top were benches and a single vending machine that sold only cold green tea. The tomb itself looked like this. On our way back down, it was funny to hear all of the Japanese visitors panting and obviously complaining about the stairs, too.
Back at the bottom we were now required to take off our shoes to continue into the shrine itself. We saw some workers behind a veil restoring parts of the artwork. You couldn't take any pictures, but there sure were a lot of priests selling trinkets promising to bring wealth, happiness, etc. There were even window decals to put on your car to help you be safe while driving.
To the South was yet another temple that our shoes had to be removed for, and I was wishing I hadn't tied mine so tightly again after the previous temple. This one featured a huge painting of a dragon on the ceiling. A priest demonstrated by clacking two wooden blocks together loudly that only while standing directly beneath the dragon's head would a reverberating tone echo through the temple. This is said to be the sound of the dragon's roar.
Out the gate to the South of the complex we found yet another temple, this one named Rinno-Ji. We were getting hungry, so we headed to the south to find a place to eat. It was also beginning to sprinkle outside. We ran across a nice looking little noodle shop where Erin decided from looking at the plastic food models outside that she wanted to eat curry and rice, and I saw that they had zaru soba on the menu (which I had been wanting to try for a long time) so we went inside.
The place felt especially cozy, as the interior was dimly lit and the combination of the tall forest and rain made it seem almost like night. The waitress brought us an English menu and we pointed to our selections. A friendly collie was roaming the place like part of the family, and several people (either regular customers or the owner's relatives) talked to it often.
Erin enjoyed her curry, and I loved my zaru soba. Zaru soba consists of buckwheat noodles that are cooked and then served cold with a soy-based dipping sauce and some wasabi and sliced leeks on the side. This particular order also included some apparently local stems and greens that were unknown to me, but tasted good.
We paid and headed back East, down the hill. As the rain was picking up, we stopped into a store and bought a couple smaller clear plastic umbrellas for 350 Yen each before proceeding back past the bus stop where we had been dropped off and heading further down the hill toward the famous Shinkyo bridge.
It was sprinkling at a fairly steady pace, and the ancient, moss-covered stone path we were walking down was starting to worry me, so I kept reminding Erin to be careful. At one point, I noticed that there was a tiny inch worm dangling from my umbrella. I grabbed it and showed it to Erin, who said I should put it on a tree or something, so I stepped over a small stone ditch to the right and shook it off.
Stepping back onto the path, I slipped and fell.
I had The Rough Guide to Tokyo in one hand, an umbrella in the other, and my camera around my neck. In retrospect, I should have immediately tossed the book and the umbrella and grabbed my camera. Instead, I landed on my knees, left elbow and right hand, shortly followed by my camera's lens striking sharply against stone. The sting of the fall left me unable to answer Erin's "Are you okay?" for a few seconds, but I was pretty much fine. Nothing broken anyway, except for a big hole and moss stains on my knees, a stinging palm and an elbow badly friction-burned from the inside of my jacket (it's been nearly two weeks and my elbow is still trying to heal). The camera lens was only superficially damaged, as I took a quick test photo to make sure it was working fine. I kept laughing periodically for quite a while after that, but Erin didn't find it so amusing.
Anyway, at the bottom of the hill was the Shinkyo bridge, supposedly built by dragons to help a monk get across. After looking at it for a while, we asked a nearby monk where the bus stop was. He tried to give us directions, so we headed in that general direction, then decided to just walk down the hill back to the station...the hill that we had almost climbed at the start of this adventure and would have seriously regretted.
This ended up being the better idea, because we got to see a lot of local color -- gas stations, antique stores and thrift stores, bakeries, residences, etc. We finally passed a post office while it was open and mailed a card I had been carrying around for a friend. We also stopped into a SunKus convenience store and bought Erin a purin flavored ice cream cone with a Kit Kat shoved in the middle.
Once we made it back to the station, we bought Limited Express tickets back to Tokyo and hopped on. This time we knew enough to take our assigned seats, and the train was much more crowded.
The seats in these trains could be turned around so that a group could face each other. A loud group of women sitting opposite us were doing just that. During the train ride we slept quite a bit, but periodically we noticed these women drinking tall beers, eating french fries, discussing recipies, and even arm wrestling. They got off a few stops before us, so it got quite a bit quieter from there.
Once we made it back to Shinjuku station I was hungry again, so we stopped in McDonalds so I could try their Japan exclusive shrimp sandwich, the "Ebi Filet-O". Ebi is Japanese for shrimp, but don't ask me why it's not called the "Filet-O-Ebi". Anyway, it was basically a clump of shrimp battered together into one patty, and was very tasty. I'd buy it all the time if they had it here, so it's probably good that they don't.
It had been a packed day, so after a quick photo of my "wounds" that Erin insisted on taking, we watched some weird Japanese TV and went to bed.
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