Travel and Leisure
Day 12/13: Nikko
After the hubub of Tokyo, I knew we would need a break. While you can do Nikko as a day-trip from Tokyo, it's a pretty long day. And being the newbies to Japan rail that we are, we screwed up by not pre-booking the "Limited Express" seats, so we had to wait for availability and only got to Nikko around 2 pm. After a whirlwind experience with the woman at the tourist information centre, we mapped our visit into two blocks; afternoon at the
Kanmangafuchi Abyss and
Tamozawa Imperial Villa, then next morning around the historic temple sites. And it’s cooler here… thank goodness!
The abyss was a short bus ride and 15 minute walk from where we dropped our bags at the Nikko Station Hotel II. It is an easy riverside stroll along this relatively short length of gorge but the dramatic term "abyss" seemed a bit overstated. Sure there's some small waterfalls and swirling rapids, but the area was also used as, you guessed it, a place of worship. There are about 70 stone statues of Jizo, a Bodhisattva who cares for the deceased. The red hats and bibs have something to do with protecting children or just reverence and kindness for the dead - it's not really well defined on western websites.
Another short walk from the entrance to the abyss, was the Imperial Villa. With almost no tourists, this was another great find for us to explore. The original core of the complex was actually used by the emperor in Tokyo around 1872, but was moved to Nikko in 1899. The rest of the complex was built around this, and used as a summer house for crown prince Taisho. I imagined the scenes from the Vancouver-shot
Shōgun tv show, taking place in and around this extravagant villa.
The next morning, since we were already up early (we never really adjusted to the timezone), we hit the temples. Armed with the info from the tourist information, we hit
Rin’nōji Taiyū-in Temple while the rest of the tourists were waking up/taking the train in from Tokyo. Since we were told that our next temple stop would be very busy, we made our way over there just after opening at 9 am.
Toshogu Shrine was already getting slammed with visitors upon our arrival (I use Google Photos to remove people from our pics). With over a dozen structures scattered over the shrine site, the crowd was spread out a bit, but it was still very busy. You end up following a stream of tourists up a lengthy set of stairs to the tomb of Ieyasu, which after a lot of huffing and puffing, was really underwhelming. Back to our hotel to grab our bags and get on our reserved seats back to Tokyo then onward for...
Days 13 and 14: Hakone
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| Hotel photo of the open-air onsen |
Hakone is known as an onsen (hot spring) town, where dozens of springs provide hot water for the town's spas and ryokan. We stayed at Hotel Senkei, in a traditional room, where the property's hot water and spas are fed by a local spring, as we found out our first evening, when a tree fell and disrupted both services!
The town itself is small and spread out, so with a supper-time arrival, we really only had time to grab dinner and settle in. The next day, we did the big loop of Hakone, using train, cable-car (funicular), ropeway (gondola), pirate ship (?!?) and bus. It is pretty touristy, but you get nice vantage points over the valley and on clear days, views of Mt. Fuji. We pretty much followed the
Hakone Round Course outlined on the website, but did not stop at the museums or Gora Park. With a stop at a
lakeside restaurant for some schnitzel, this took most of a leisurely day.
Back in town, the feed pipe for the hot springs had been repaired, so we both took in the spas (hers outside on the 5th floor overlooking the valley, mine inside). The thing about these towns, is that they are really catering to the daytrippers, and so restaurant selection is limited at night (same with Nikko). Still trying to avoid the fishy-taste of the Japanese food, we settled on a small (and pricey) burger joint called
Box Burger, but we were not disappointed! Down a series of tiny streets and alleyways, this little place served up a meal as good as or better than our Wagyu burgers back in Kyoto.
Days 15-17: On to Osaka
We made a mistake on booking the Shinkansen high-speed train (more on the next post) but managed to to make the ~4 hour journey to our Airbnb in Osaka, located in the
Namba area. I knew we'd be getting pretty exhausted from our journey thus far, so I had chosen one that was really in the heart of the action, and we definitely were! We didn't need to use the metro to get around, as we were located only a block from
Kuromon Market and a few blocks from bustling Dotonbori; we certainly did not lack for Osaka atmosphere.
Our first night there, we took in the action on the brightly lit
Dotonbori street, where there are thousands of tourists taking pictures and sampling the food along the way. There's a little historical street that runs parallel to this,
Hozenji Yokocho, with narrow alleys that are lined by traditional restaurants and izakaya, and are reminiscent of the atmosphere of past eras. We had our dinner there, at a neat little spot called
Dotonbori Terrace, where we had our last Okonomiyaki.
We'd pretty much urban-Japan'ed out by this point, so we spent a leisurely morning poking around the Namba Parks & City shopping complex, adjacent to the Namba station. During our trip planning, we searched for festivals that would be taking place in Japan during our trip. We found in a suburb of Osaka, there would be the
Kishiwada Danjiri Festival taking place while we were there, and so we made this our last afternoon/evening event.
During the day, a hundred or more men pull elaborately crafted wooden Danjiri floats perilously fast around street corners, while riders "surf" on the rooftops, egging their teams on. We didn't see any crashes, but apparently it does happen! After an evening break where the respective teams split off for their bbq dinners, they decorate the floats with lanterns, and parade them back through the streets at night.
It was a fitting way to end our Japanese trip, if a little frustrating, as I'll detail next in...
The trials and tribulations of travelling in Japan
