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tobu_ishiAn entry two weeks in the making, comes to you at last. Also known as, I Need My Own Camera.
Some time ago, I mentioned an upcoming weekend trip to Nikko with some friends. That trip upcame and went two weekends ago, and now, on the eve of its two-week anniversary, I bring you...
My Nikko Trip Journal
*
Before I get on to the trip, let's have some opening credits.
Plan Originator - My friend Sean
Photographer - My friend Mike
Random Travel Companion - My friend Doug (see upcoming Kawagoe Matsuri report)
Token Female Party Member - Yours truly
When I left class on Friday afternoon two weeks ago, I had no particular plans for the weekend. I was looking forward to merely knocking around the house with my host brothers, maybe going to the park or some other entertainment cooked up by my tireless host mama. This changed when my friend Sean approached me with plans to go haring off to some place called Nikko on about 15 hours notice, armed with his guide to Japanese hiking. Supposedly the place was famous for hot springs, waterfalls, and green forested mountains. Sounded deliciously homey, and supposedly we could do it for under 10000 yen if we youth hostelled and didn't eat much.
Ha. Such a quaint and naiive little bunch were we.
Notwithstanding, three of us bit the bait, and on Saturday morning we all bundled onto the train and set forth for Nikko, fresh-faced and knapsack-equipped. The train ride took several hours and quite a few transfers from line to line, but I had shrewdly picked up a copy of Howl's Moving Castle (the book, not the Ghibli adaptation) to keep me entertained while we skimmed across Japan.
Halfway there, we missed a connection and wandered off to explore the town we ended up in...Asakusa, home of a giant Buddhist temple, which is attached to an equally giant warren of merchandising booths through which you must pass to reach said temple. Photos follow thusly:
Every one of the gorgeous photos I'm about to share was taken by the guy about to be squashed by that giant lantern, the lovely and talented Mike. All hail. In truth, this is the giant lantern hung in the gateway to the temple mall. XD
The temple mall in all its crowded, materialistic glory.
A closer shot, as we entered. Feel the claustrophobia setting in.
One of the booths sold these fascinating little pressed cakes, stuffed with various fillings and molded in this dangerous-looking apparatus.
Next door to the cake machine was a bean shop. It literally sold nothing but beans. Even those kanji on the banner there say "bean bean bean bean bean". Follyites...? Don't say anything. XD
The end of the temple mall, the entrance to the temple complex. At last!
The main temple courtyard. Please note what looks like a giant incense burner in the middle of the courtyard, because it is exactly that. Please also note the fortune-telling booths on the left, because they'll come into play later.
A closer look at the incense burner. It is holy, as a matter of fact, and waving the smoke over your body is supposed to cure ills. It mostly made us cough and splutter. So we took a closer look at the inside of the thing...
Holy giant ashtrays, Batman!
We distracted ourselves from our defeat at the incense burner by buying fortunes at the booths to its immediate left. I drew straight up "Luck", which was the best any of us did; the boys all got "Small Luck", the next best. Nobody got "Great Luck", but nobody got "Bad Luck" either, so that's all right then. Above is Mike's fortune, which we chose to photograph on the merit of...
...the translation on the other side being chockablock full of Engrish. XD
A rather famous pagoda on the temple grounds.
More temple hijinks.
Finally, we caught our connection, and continued our journey to its eventual end in Nikko, land of misty mountains. A few photos might best sum up our first impressions:
Considering that it was drizzling lightly, the mountains were indeed misty and picturesque. Having been raised in Washington, a state where the locals are fondly referred to as "Webfeet", the precipication didn't dampen my spirits much, though it did dampen our prospects of hiking that day. I was more worried about lodgings. We'd planned to stay at a local (unnamed here for reasons of not being a spiteful brat) temple which the guidebook said did not require reservations, but when Sean handed the phone to me to call them up...the conversation went thusly.
Unknown Temple Person: So-and-So Temple.
Me: Oh, hello. Pardon me, but I'm an American exchange student studying at Tokyo International University in Kawagoe, and my three friends and I were wondering if there were any rooms available at your--
Unknown Temple Person: There aren't. *click*
Well, praise be to Amida Buddha of infinite mercy to you, too. This development led to some frantic shuffling of itinerary and local phone books, but we managed to find a room at a guest house about forty minutes' very scenic walk from the station. We set out on said scenic walk posthaste, after a consultation of the map boards outside the touristy little train station:
...told us that the local mecca, a shrine to the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu, was on the way. We stopped off halfway there for a hot bowl of ramen at a shop, which had a student special on that was supposed to be for middle school and high school students. For an entire bowl of ramen and a drink for 500 yen, we were quite willing to pretend not to understand the kanji on the sign, and flashed our college IDs at them hopefully. The staff gave us knowing grins, and the discount. Is it still a gaijin smash when the people you're smashing are full and amused participants in the joke?
In any case, the ramen was delicious, cheered us all up after the stress of finding lodgings, and sent us back out on the street with a spring in our step. We passed quite a few shops on the way, since Nikko consists of about one street total, and that one street is packed solid with souvenir shops.
Local delicacies in pretty boxes, surprisingly cheap to boot. Prime stuff for Japanese travellers looking for something to take home for the unending obligation of "omiyage" (the custom of giving souvenirs to everybody and his auntie, practiced with grim determination in Japan).
Kitty-chan strikes again. XD
This store sold rather lovely, rather expensive paintings of Japanese-style dragons...in case you couldn't pick that up among the Engrish.
We passed through the Tokugawa shrine on the way up, but it was pitch black and abandoned, so we resolved to come back the next day. We get did a wicked cool photograph of the dragon fountain in the parking lot area, which was way cooler at night:
We also passed a very pretty bridge, holy to the Shinto religion and therefore operated on a toll system by the shrine at one end of it. We opted not to plunk down a few hundred yen to walk across a bridge, but Mike went completely bonkers over the view and started photographing it madly. He repeated this performance every time we passed it for the next 48 hours. Every time. We retaliated by mocking him good-humoredly...I am proud to say, at least, that no one suggested he marry it.
Mike's lovely new girlfriend...
At last we reached the guest house and settled in for the night. It was a surprisingly comfortable and clean place, for 5000 yen per night per traveller. We had to make our own beds, which was incredibly confusing (they had bedding in there that we had no names for, let alone any idea what to do with) but we constructed passable nests and managed to accidentally catch the world premiere of a new anime series about vampires, appropriately named Blood, on the room television.
We also crashed the bathhouse. I had the entire women's side to myself, which made me feel very queenly, swimming about in my own little private heated swimming pool, until a honkload of water arced over the wall and crashed down without warning on my head, accompanied by male laughter. Turns out the two sides were mirror images and they correctly triangulated my location by assuming it was the exact opposite of theirs. I retaliated with the gooseneck showerheads, but the boys called foul on this, because apparently the showers on their side didn't have the juice to clear the wall (how's that for some Freudian irony?). That didn't stop the four of us from having an epic waterfight by using the washing buckets to fling mighty tsunamis of water over the wall between the two sides, which was only about ten feet high. Talk about laughing in the face of the gender barrier.
Our palatial lodgings (that's my knee, on my bed, in the far right lower corner).
The next day was a two-stop itinerary, after we'd eaten at the Japanese equivalent of a Denny's (they're called Gusts and they serve Japanese and Western food...and hot Aquarius, a coffee-temperature ripoff of Pocari Sweat). First, we would go to the Tokugawa Shrine. Then, we would hike out to a famous Shinto shrine known for its scenic location. To save myself from writing more witty captions, I shall let the beauty of these places speak for itself, except when the skullduggery we got up to at that location demands explanation.
Tokugawa Shrine
Kendo Hall
(adjacent to Tokugawa Shrine)
Our Hike
(It took us through a beautiful Buddhist temple hidden up along a cliff near the main street of town, with a graveyard that wound halfway up the cliff in a series of little wooded terraces. We then walked for quite a way through some gorgeous scenery, stopped off in a woodworking museum where a man was making traditional sandals, which he let us try on--they were obscenely comfortable, and just as obscenely expensive, so we left wistful but without any new footwear--and finally reached the Shinto shrine, which was surrounded with waterfalls and absolutely breathtaking. Bask in the beauty of Nikko. ^_^)
As you can see, one cannot hunt guns in Tochigi prefecture.
We entertained ourselves when the hike got rough by making up the most cliche possible anime scenario we could think of for us to be starring in, to explain why we were trucking through Nikko's hinterlands with Mike scuttling off into the bushes to take photographs of trees and rocks every five minutes. We decided Mike was a young boy with the power to see menacing aliens through the lens of his camera, so that what Sean and I thought was a weird yen for photographing dirt and random streams was actually his attempt to save us from aliens who wanted to eat our brains. Accordingly, we took a cast picture in cliche anime poses in front of a pretty farmhouse we passed.
And...that was Nikko. We got back from our hike just in time to buy dinner at a conbini and hop the train home, right as it was getting dark. The trip went...a bit over budget, but not terribly so. Next time we'll plan for longer than 15 hours before setting out on a weekend trip. And for a totally spur-of-the-moment trip, it was fantastic fun. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait for our next major outing...
The Kansai Gaidai trip next weekend! XD Tanoshimi ni!
Some time ago, I mentioned an upcoming weekend trip to Nikko with some friends. That trip upcame and went two weekends ago, and now, on the eve of its two-week anniversary, I bring you...
My Nikko Trip Journal
*
Before I get on to the trip, let's have some opening credits.
Plan Originator - My friend Sean
Photographer - My friend Mike
Random Travel Companion - My friend Doug (see upcoming Kawagoe Matsuri report)
Token Female Party Member - Yours truly
When I left class on Friday afternoon two weeks ago, I had no particular plans for the weekend. I was looking forward to merely knocking around the house with my host brothers, maybe going to the park or some other entertainment cooked up by my tireless host mama. This changed when my friend Sean approached me with plans to go haring off to some place called Nikko on about 15 hours notice, armed with his guide to Japanese hiking. Supposedly the place was famous for hot springs, waterfalls, and green forested mountains. Sounded deliciously homey, and supposedly we could do it for under 10000 yen if we youth hostelled and didn't eat much.
Ha. Such a quaint and naiive little bunch were we.
Notwithstanding, three of us bit the bait, and on Saturday morning we all bundled onto the train and set forth for Nikko, fresh-faced and knapsack-equipped. The train ride took several hours and quite a few transfers from line to line, but I had shrewdly picked up a copy of Howl's Moving Castle (the book, not the Ghibli adaptation) to keep me entertained while we skimmed across Japan.
Halfway there, we missed a connection and wandered off to explore the town we ended up in...Asakusa, home of a giant Buddhist temple, which is attached to an equally giant warren of merchandising booths through which you must pass to reach said temple. Photos follow thusly:
Every one of the gorgeous photos I'm about to share was taken by the guy about to be squashed by that giant lantern, the lovely and talented Mike. All hail. In truth, this is the giant lantern hung in the gateway to the temple mall. XD
The temple mall in all its crowded, materialistic glory.
A closer shot, as we entered. Feel the claustrophobia setting in.
One of the booths sold these fascinating little pressed cakes, stuffed with various fillings and molded in this dangerous-looking apparatus.
Next door to the cake machine was a bean shop. It literally sold nothing but beans. Even those kanji on the banner there say "bean bean bean bean bean". Follyites...? Don't say anything. XD
The end of the temple mall, the entrance to the temple complex. At last!
The main temple courtyard. Please note what looks like a giant incense burner in the middle of the courtyard, because it is exactly that. Please also note the fortune-telling booths on the left, because they'll come into play later.
A closer look at the incense burner. It is holy, as a matter of fact, and waving the smoke over your body is supposed to cure ills. It mostly made us cough and splutter. So we took a closer look at the inside of the thing...
Holy giant ashtrays, Batman!
We distracted ourselves from our defeat at the incense burner by buying fortunes at the booths to its immediate left. I drew straight up "Luck", which was the best any of us did; the boys all got "Small Luck", the next best. Nobody got "Great Luck", but nobody got "Bad Luck" either, so that's all right then. Above is Mike's fortune, which we chose to photograph on the merit of...
...the translation on the other side being chockablock full of Engrish. XD
A rather famous pagoda on the temple grounds.
More temple hijinks.
Finally, we caught our connection, and continued our journey to its eventual end in Nikko, land of misty mountains. A few photos might best sum up our first impressions:
Considering that it was drizzling lightly, the mountains were indeed misty and picturesque. Having been raised in Washington, a state where the locals are fondly referred to as "Webfeet", the precipication didn't dampen my spirits much, though it did dampen our prospects of hiking that day. I was more worried about lodgings. We'd planned to stay at a local (unnamed here for reasons of not being a spiteful brat) temple which the guidebook said did not require reservations, but when Sean handed the phone to me to call them up...the conversation went thusly.
Unknown Temple Person: So-and-So Temple.
Me: Oh, hello. Pardon me, but I'm an American exchange student studying at Tokyo International University in Kawagoe, and my three friends and I were wondering if there were any rooms available at your--
Unknown Temple Person: There aren't. *click*
Well, praise be to Amida Buddha of infinite mercy to you, too. This development led to some frantic shuffling of itinerary and local phone books, but we managed to find a room at a guest house about forty minutes' very scenic walk from the station. We set out on said scenic walk posthaste, after a consultation of the map boards outside the touristy little train station:
...told us that the local mecca, a shrine to the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu, was on the way. We stopped off halfway there for a hot bowl of ramen at a shop, which had a student special on that was supposed to be for middle school and high school students. For an entire bowl of ramen and a drink for 500 yen, we were quite willing to pretend not to understand the kanji on the sign, and flashed our college IDs at them hopefully. The staff gave us knowing grins, and the discount. Is it still a gaijin smash when the people you're smashing are full and amused participants in the joke?
In any case, the ramen was delicious, cheered us all up after the stress of finding lodgings, and sent us back out on the street with a spring in our step. We passed quite a few shops on the way, since Nikko consists of about one street total, and that one street is packed solid with souvenir shops.
Local delicacies in pretty boxes, surprisingly cheap to boot. Prime stuff for Japanese travellers looking for something to take home for the unending obligation of "omiyage" (the custom of giving souvenirs to everybody and his auntie, practiced with grim determination in Japan).
Kitty-chan strikes again. XD
This store sold rather lovely, rather expensive paintings of Japanese-style dragons...in case you couldn't pick that up among the Engrish.
We passed through the Tokugawa shrine on the way up, but it was pitch black and abandoned, so we resolved to come back the next day. We get did a wicked cool photograph of the dragon fountain in the parking lot area, which was way cooler at night:
We also passed a very pretty bridge, holy to the Shinto religion and therefore operated on a toll system by the shrine at one end of it. We opted not to plunk down a few hundred yen to walk across a bridge, but Mike went completely bonkers over the view and started photographing it madly. He repeated this performance every time we passed it for the next 48 hours. Every time. We retaliated by mocking him good-humoredly...I am proud to say, at least, that no one suggested he marry it.
Mike's lovely new girlfriend...
At last we reached the guest house and settled in for the night. It was a surprisingly comfortable and clean place, for 5000 yen per night per traveller. We had to make our own beds, which was incredibly confusing (they had bedding in there that we had no names for, let alone any idea what to do with) but we constructed passable nests and managed to accidentally catch the world premiere of a new anime series about vampires, appropriately named Blood, on the room television.
We also crashed the bathhouse. I had the entire women's side to myself, which made me feel very queenly, swimming about in my own little private heated swimming pool, until a honkload of water arced over the wall and crashed down without warning on my head, accompanied by male laughter. Turns out the two sides were mirror images and they correctly triangulated my location by assuming it was the exact opposite of theirs. I retaliated with the gooseneck showerheads, but the boys called foul on this, because apparently the showers on their side didn't have the juice to clear the wall (how's that for some Freudian irony?). That didn't stop the four of us from having an epic waterfight by using the washing buckets to fling mighty tsunamis of water over the wall between the two sides, which was only about ten feet high. Talk about laughing in the face of the gender barrier.
Our palatial lodgings (that's my knee, on my bed, in the far right lower corner).
The next day was a two-stop itinerary, after we'd eaten at the Japanese equivalent of a Denny's (they're called Gusts and they serve Japanese and Western food...and hot Aquarius, a coffee-temperature ripoff of Pocari Sweat). First, we would go to the Tokugawa Shrine. Then, we would hike out to a famous Shinto shrine known for its scenic location. To save myself from writing more witty captions, I shall let the beauty of these places speak for itself, except when the skullduggery we got up to at that location demands explanation.
Tokugawa Shrine
Kendo Hall
(adjacent to Tokugawa Shrine)
Our Hike
(It took us through a beautiful Buddhist temple hidden up along a cliff near the main street of town, with a graveyard that wound halfway up the cliff in a series of little wooded terraces. We then walked for quite a way through some gorgeous scenery, stopped off in a woodworking museum where a man was making traditional sandals, which he let us try on--they were obscenely comfortable, and just as obscenely expensive, so we left wistful but without any new footwear--and finally reached the Shinto shrine, which was surrounded with waterfalls and absolutely breathtaking. Bask in the beauty of Nikko. ^_^)
As you can see, one cannot hunt guns in Tochigi prefecture.
We entertained ourselves when the hike got rough by making up the most cliche possible anime scenario we could think of for us to be starring in, to explain why we were trucking through Nikko's hinterlands with Mike scuttling off into the bushes to take photographs of trees and rocks every five minutes. We decided Mike was a young boy with the power to see menacing aliens through the lens of his camera, so that what Sean and I thought was a weird yen for photographing dirt and random streams was actually his attempt to save us from aliens who wanted to eat our brains. Accordingly, we took a cast picture in cliche anime poses in front of a pretty farmhouse we passed.
And...that was Nikko. We got back from our hike just in time to buy dinner at a conbini and hop the train home, right as it was getting dark. The trip went...a bit over budget, but not terribly so. Next time we'll plan for longer than 15 hours before setting out on a weekend trip. And for a totally spur-of-the-moment trip, it was fantastic fun. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait for our next major outing...
The Kansai Gaidai trip next weekend! XD Tanoshimi ni!
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 11:46 am (UTC)*bonk*
no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 12:00 pm (UTC)email it to me? or IM it to me from bluelady? u__u
no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-22 12:52 am (UTC)Random person invasion
Date: 2005-10-22 03:25 pm (UTC)Hey... I found you through Fullmetal Folly, and I'm just another random person...
Anyway, I'm a senior in high school doing an independent thesis on women in Asian liuterature (which, of course, includes Japan, duh) and I am in need of some chapter filler images for the book I am writing. Your (Mike's I guess, re-reading the introduction..) photography is beautiful; I was wondering if I may use some (of course you'll/Mike will recieve creidt for it :-))?
Please reply,
Lirin
Re: Random person invasion
Date: 2005-10-23 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-22 11:10 pm (UTC)This is the Scieszka player, come to bother you more thoroughly! *waving*
And pictures are spiffy! (I'm a photo geek, therefore I completely understand falling in love with the view. ~___~;; )
I wanna go for a ride mommy!
Date: 2005-10-23 10:04 pm (UTC)so you're on LJ
Date: 2005-10-27 06:31 am (UTC)you don't know me, but i shall stalk you from now on. hee. :D
Re: so you're on LJ
Date: 2005-10-27 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-05 05:00 am (UTC)I hope to see more photos.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 06:59 am (UTC)Btw, I'm friending you. >O
no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 12:56 am (UTC)i'll try and send it next week.
SORREH! *head x wall OTP*