Adventures in Japan

Day Two Dozen: Nikko

It must be tough to be a weather person in Japan. It is such a skinny island, surrounded by all sorts of unpredictable air masses. I can totally understand why the weather today is nothing like the weather they forecasted for today yesterday. I can understand it, but I don't have to like it. The weather was not bad today, that is not what I am getting at. It was much better than had been predicted. But it is hard to plan your activities, when you don't know if you'll be wanting to spend the whole day indoors or not.

Also making the decision making process difficult: never knowing if schoolbuses full of rowdy children are going to descend upon your next sightseeing locale. Yesterday was a bit scarring. It was like an amusement park without the rides. All lines and loud.

Today turned out to be much better.


Didn't start out that way.

Nikko is about two and a half hours out of Tokyo by train. The train was standing room only by the time it came to our stop. We were the second stop.

It wasn't like sardines in a can, or anything near that bad. But still: no sitting for 2.5 hours. First thing in the morning. That is the exact opposite of Folgers in your cup.

Add to that the fact that a group of loud Slavic sounding gentlemen made their way onto our carriage and poached any seat as soon as it opened up, and we were not happy campers. One of them had incredibly long nose hair. He could have braided it. Like one of the other gentlemen did to his chin hair. His braided beard brushed against his bountiful belly.

As soon as our train arrived in Nikko, we went straight to the ticket counter and booked seats for the ride back.

Then we ate some lunch.


Then we took in the sights. Remember a few days back? When I blogged about Takayama? The miniatures that took fifteen years to make?

We saw the full size versions today. Also very impressive, in a very different way. A lot more weathered looking (and a lot larger, obviously), but with a fantastic backdrop of nature.


Some of the nature was looking kinda gross.

Trees and sky and water. And gold. Lots and lots of gold. And carvings of animals and flowers and worshipers and gods and so on. Lovely stuff to look at, when you can get out of the way of the crowds and actually look at the lovely stuff.

It wasn't too terribly crowded today, but Japanese people are just pushy by nature I guess.

Still, we got some good photos, some nice footage. And a nice day was had by all.




Oh yeah? You know those hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil monkeys? They started here. They are just one of the many carvings.