Tokyo Part 2 (Nikko)

Hello! It's been a while, I know, I'm sorry! I was about to write about the lovely trip I just took along the coast to Hiroshima, but realised that I never finished writing about my time in Tokyo. So here's the trip to Nikko:

Like I wrote last time, Nikko is the place where the first Tokugawa shogun is buried. To get to it you have to take a long train ride out of the city, and we saw Mt Fuji in the distance! Nikko is right up in the mountains, and although it was a little cold in Tokyo, we still weren't expecting this fountain;

The area is covered with temples and shrines - also hotels, actually, all seemingly closed, because the high season in Nikko is when the autumn leaves are at their best. Felt a little like a ghost town in January though... In any case, the first temple we walked past looked like this:

They'd constructed an entire building around it and drawn the temple on... (You could still go inside and pray and stuff, it just felt a little strange...)

From there we went to the site of the shogun's tomb, which, luckily, wasn't undergoing such big renovations.

The stable of the sacred horse that lives on the site is also noteworthy: it's decorated with the 'See no evil, hear no evil..,' monkeys.

Then we went on a walk around other smaller notable shrines. The mountain seems full of little holy springs and special wishing rocks. We found this stone dating back a couple of hundred years asking pilgrims to kindly refrain from relieving themselves in the holy forest of the mountain.

Also this little guy who someone had left at a shrine:

To end the walk we went down to the gorge, where there are a famous line of Buddhist statues, nicknames the 'bake jizo' (ghost Buddhas) because it is said that if you count them one way, and then count them again, you will end up seeing a different amount...

We didn't try to count them...

I don't know if the legend stems from it, but there were actually more statues until a great flood about 100 years ago, where many were swept away by the river that runs through the gorge. The people who live there did their best to find and return as many of the statues as they could, so along towards the end of the line are a couple of piles of rocks that may or may not have previously been statues.

(They get their own red hats and aprons anyway) 

Having been wandering on the cold all day, it was about time for something warm, so we got a really tasty set dinner with the local speciality yuba (it can be translated as tofu skimmings, but that makes it sound a lot less nice than it is).

The cup was adorable too:

So that was Nikko, I highly recommend it! Also they seem to be trying to attract foreign tourists, because we got about a 1000 yen discount on the return ticket, which helped.

I was going to write about the next couple of days here, but this post is going on a little long! I'll write about the Studio Ghibli museum and seeing the robot Asimo live in a couple of days. And this time I mean a couple of days, not 5 weeks. (Probably).