Nikko

Before even coming to Japan, I had heard about Nikko as the origin of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. For some reason that totally caught my attention and I have been looking for an opportunity to visit Nikko since I arrived! The saying itself came from China or India, but in Japan it became associated with monkeys because of a play on words ("don't do" sounds similiar to "monkey" in old Japanese).

Nikko is in the mountains, so it was considerably colder than the spring temperatures we had just gotten used to! In fact it snowed the morning we left Nikko (sleek actually, but snow sounds more dramatic). We stayed at a really nice place in Nikko. I'd definitely recommend Nikko Park Lodge! It's really cozy and is clearly the place to stay, judging by all the cool travellers we met there! Nikko was pretty and had cedar forests. We even saw wild monkeys and deer!

As we walked from our hotel to the sites, I noticed this severely over-engineered river channel! And then this billboard directing tourists to the interesting weirs around Nikko! Maybe there was a hydrologist convention in town that weekend?

We first saw Shinkyo which is sacred bridge. It didn't look particulary sacred, but you be the judge.

Then we went into the National Park where the temples and shrines were. The most impressive was Tosho-gu, a shrine and Ieyasu's mausoleum. (Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate.) This shrine was confusing to me, because it had a pagoda, which I think are generally associated with temples rather than shrines.

And it's not like other Japanese shrines. It's covered in gold leaf! Really beautiful! This is where the carvings of the monkeys are. And these carvings of elephants were made by an artist who had never seen a real elephant (at least according to Lonely Planet).

We then climbed these stairs to Ieyasu's mausoleum. On the way we missed the Sleeping Cat, which is famous throughout Japan (we're not sure why. Probably just because it's cute). We looked and looked for the cat before asking a fellow tourist who directed us back down all the stairs, and sure enough, there was a crowd of people taking pictures of the cat carving. We walked right under it on our way up.

After seeing the rest of the shrines and temples there, we took a very expensive bus ride up a very curvy mountain road to Kegon Falls. Japan’s most famous waterfalls are not so breathtaking, at least not in very early spring. We took an elevator down through the earth to a platform. The falls drop 318 feet. And yes that's snow on the ground.

We had just a bit of daylight and energy left after the falls, so we walked along these Jizo statues. This particular walk is called the Mystery Jizo walk because the number of jizos you count isn't the same coming and going. We didn't bother counting - it was sprinkling, and there were other tourists there counting for us. They did get the same number though.

That was it for Nikko. The next day we took a 14 hour train ride back to Himeji. Luckily it was incident free, but the skies were too cloudy so we didn't see Mt. Fugi.