Nikko

Miyako and I have been seeing a lot of Japan during this past week. We came home from Kamakura Friday afternoon and Saturday morning we were off again to Nikko. Kan has had visitors from the US in for work this past week and Saturday we took his co-worker and family to Nikko for the day. Kan was not very familiar with the area as he had never been before, so we opted for a tour guide, which worked out perfect for Miyako as she took a 90 minute nap in the van. The tour guide took us up in the mountains for a wonderful lunch. You could see waterfalls from our table and it was a gorgeous view. The weather gods must have been looking out for us because it poured down rain while we were eating. Once we were finished though, the sun came out and we went to see some beautiful waterfalls up close. There is a lake at Nikko that is fairly large. The waterfalls you see on this post are called Kekko waterfalls and they are formed from the overflow of water from the large lake. They were absolutely beautiful. After the waterfalls we went to a famous shrine in Nikko. It always amazes me the attention to detail at these shrines and just how big they are. You can see in our group photo simply how big they are as our tour guide had to stand far away to get the shrine in the photo with us. We look like little ants. :) We joked that it would not matter if you blinked in the photo as we are so small, but it simply shows you the magnitude of how big the shrines are. This particular shrine we went to see supposedly was built in a year and a half and there were 6 million people who worked on it. Nikko is up in the mountains so you can imagine that when it was built, I think around 1100, they did not have large trucks to hall lumber or equipment up to build the shrine so they needed lots of manpower. To be honest, I was not quite looking forward to another long day as we had been in Kamakura and Miyako was probably needing a day at home to rest and recover. However, we really had a fabulous time and Miyako did great on both trips this week. It was fun to hang out with people from Kentucky. We joined them today for dinner at Monjayaki and a little more Tokyo sight-seeing. Tomorrow I decided to go with them back to Kamakura for the day and see the big Buddha. And Tuesday night we are meeting them for dinner in Odaiba before they head back to the States on Wednesday. The husband is a UK grad so we have lots to talk about!