Nikko

In the end of November we went for a weekend trip to Nikko. Nikko is a couple of hours north of Tos and shrines on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is mostly famous for being a Buddhist tempkyo and has templele place. It was also the home of the BIG War-Lord (before the Meiji period), very “sympathetic” as he killed his wife and son because it looked good politically! Nikko was also the home of Meiji during WW2. So it is one of THE places to go to in Japan. This means that everyone is there too….lots of people. This month the leaves were starting to change color, and that is a good reason to go to Nikko, since it lies in the middle of a national park and has very beautiful surroundings.

We arrived late Friday evening in Nikko. We had learned from our Kamakura-Prince-hotel experience and booked a cheap hostel which seemed pretty good, had great reviews, and had available rooms. The hostel was a bit far from the station, so we had to take a taxi, but the room was very cheap, nice, clean and they served us very good breakfast. They even had a toilet-paper roll holder with music…. drove us crazy though.

Saturday we had our temples and shrines day. We tried to see as much as we could of all the shrines and temples as we could. They were very beautiful and a bit different from the ones we had seen previously. Nikko is also famous for its many wild monkeys and a shrine (or something) with three monkeys on them, probably seen them before.

After seeing all the shrines and temples, we took one of the walking trails around the city and the parks. It was very nice and relaxing to get away from the people and walk in the nature. We also saw some funny looking figures with red hat and napkin around its neck. After asking some Japanese people (in Japanese..!) we found out that these were supposed to be baby Buddha’s and the area around was a ruin of an old temple.

In the end of the walking trail, we had a “brilliant idea”. It was only about 16:30, so not dark quite yet. Nikko is also famous for all the water falls that there are in this neighborhood, and we thought it would be nice to see one that happened to be very near by……well the map showed about 3km, but the text called it a three-hour hike. We thought that we are much faster than the normal Japanese person, so we started to walk, almost run, uphill. After about 30 minutes (and it was getting darker by the minute) the signs pointed into the woods (or at least that was what we thought). We kept on going for a while longer. Pretty exhausted we met a dead end in the road (and it was dark!), can say we was pretty pissed off! Nothing..! We must have taken the wrong way somewhere. So all we were left with was to turn around and walk back down (what a disappointment). It was a bit scary to walk down in the dark thought and hearing monkeys scream around you…but unfortunately we didn`t see one.

Since our waterfall-excursion the day before was such a bad one, we decided on Sunday to go to one of the largest ones by bus. We woke up early and were ready to have a great day seeing the waterfall and possibly hike around a big lake. Well we couldn’t have been more wrong. The bus was totally packed, so we had to stand, which was okay since it was only 15km… that took about four hours (including a toilet break)!! It was unbelievable. During the toilet break half way, several people got of and took another bus back to Nikko (we soo should have done the same, but we thought that now we are here…so..). Two hours later we arrived at the waterfall, and at that point neither of us was very interested in that stupid waterfall. So we took our mandatory pictures, bought some souvenirs and food, and got ourselves to the bus stop to go home. This was enough! The queue to get back to Nikko was enormous, and we had to wait for one and a half hours, and it was freezing cold (Georg didn’t bring a jacket…). The bus ride back took only 30 minutes, so that was nice. Back in Nikko we took the first train to Tokyo….we wanted to go home.

All in all we had a great weekend….well a perfect Saturday and a horrible Sunday:)

More pictures here.