After leaving Sendai on Halloween, we took the Shinkansen and then a local train to Nikkō. Nikkō is a national park area just a bit north of Tokyo that has several shrines and temples as well as lots of hot springs and waterfalls, and lays claim to something like 7,000 cedars. It is also the final resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu - so there’s some rather grandiose temples in his honour. Plus, it’s supposedly the origin of the 3 monkeys.
Which these 3 monkeys visited…
Since Nikkō is in the mountains, it’s a little chilly and autumn arrives a little earlier here than in Tokyo. Mom took a ridiculous number of pictures of this tree, as did virtually all the other tourists.
Nikkō’s fame is partly due to religious reasons - the Buddhist monk Shōdō Shōnin established a hermitage in it, and was carried across the river by two huge serpents. Nowadays, they have a nice bridge that they charge a toll for, so we just took pictures from the free bridge a bit (about 50m) downstream. Here it is at night, and the following day.
We stayed in Nikkō for a couple of days (in a rather nice hotel that royalty apparently also stays at when visiting Nikkō). For dinner on the evening of the first day, we went to Hippari Dako - a tiny little mama-san restaurant that people have decorated the walls of with their business cards and momentos.
Of course, we proved the adage “it’s a small world” when I looked at the wall across from me and saw a business card for Alikatu with Troy Hrushka’s name on it - he used to live in Greg’s basement, and now lives one block over from us! Weird.
And, also of course, we had to add our own contribution to Hippari Dako’s walls. Unfortunately, none of us have business cards, so instead… we used Canadian pins to tack a $5 bill with the added speech balloon “I heartily endorse this food and/or product.” 
For our second day in Nikkō, we decided to go to Kegon Falls. Not being the type to take the easy way out, we opted to hike there (even though a bus can drop you off about 250m from the falls themselves). It’s apparently impossible for us to go on any type of hike without the use of a cable car, as we ended up buying one-way tickets on the Akechi-daira cable car. Here’s the view of the falls from the top of that cable car:
It’s a little far away, and the trail… well - it looks like this:
And in other places, it looks like this:
It also didn’t help that the Lonely Planet we’re using apparently hasn’t been updated in a little while. We were going to hike from the Akechi-daira cable car to the Chuzenji cable car, which was reported to be 1.5 km (really it was 4 km to that point). And… the Chuzenji cable car no longer exists. Argh. Another few km over the trails, but at the very least that hike was downhill, which was no small favour as by this time everyone was getting quite tired.
Eventually, we managed to get to the Kegon Falls parking lot, where all the nice comfy buses drop off their (sane) passengers to view the falls.
So… okay, it was worth it.
Feeling that we owed ourselves, we took the bus back to Nikkō proper and went to an Izakaiya for supper. An Izakaiya is a cross between a bar and a restaurant; think like Earls only with more drinking. There we sampled a large number of random dishes (all of which were quite good) and prompted the owner to remark something along the lines of osake sugoi ne? Apparently we are quite strong drinkers; which we’ve proven since, as well…
